Parameter Sniffing Is Usually A Good Thing In SQL Server

Tick Tock

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I talk to a lot of people about performance tuning. It seems like once someone is close enough to a database for long enough, they’ll have some impression of parameter sniffing. Usually a bad one.

You start to hear some funny stuff over and over again:

• We should always recompile
• We should always use local variables
• We should always recompile and use local variables

Often, even if it means writing unsafe dynamic SQL, people will be afraid to parameterize things.

Between Friends

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To some degree, I get it. You’re afraid of incurring some new performance problem.

You’ve had the same mediocre performance for years, and you don’t wanna make something worse.

The thing is, you could be making things a lot better most of the time.

• Fewer compiles and recompiles, fewer single-use plans, fewer queries with multiple plans
• Avoiding the local variable nonsense is, more often than not, going to get you better performance

A Letter To You

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I’m going to tell you something that you’re not going to like, here.

Most of the time when I see a parameter sniffing problem, I see a lot of other problems.

Shabbily written queries, obvious missing indexes, and a whole list of other things.

It’s not that you have a parameter sniffing problem, you have a general negligence problem.

After all, the bad kind of parameter sniffing means that you’ve got variations of a query plan that don’t perform well on variations of parameters.

Once you start taking care of the basics, you’ll find a whole lot less of the problems that keep you up at night.

If that’s the kind of thing you need help with, drop me a line.

Thanks for reading!

Going Further

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If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that and need to solve performance problems quickly.