Starting SQL: A Month Of SQL Server Performance Fundamentals Posts

Unlearninging

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I’m going to be taking a break in August, but I still want the Blogs To Flow™ while I’m letting my brain meat get its groove back.

So this month I’m going to run some fundamentals posts that I like teaching people about. Apologies in advance to people who expect a constant flow of more advanced stuff.

Why fundamentals? Because I still run into people struggling with the basics more than I run into people struggling with more advanced stuff.

Lots of people think they have advanced problems, but they really just screwed up something basic.

Anyway, my hope is that if you learn the basic stuff the right way, you won’t have to un-learn a bunch of bad habits later.

To Play Along

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You’ll need:

• SQL Server 2019 Developer Edition
• SSMS 18.newest
• StackOverflow2013 database

As far as hardware and settings go, I have 64GB of RAM, and 8 cores. That means my settings are:

• MAXDOP: 4
• Cost Threshold for Paralelism: 50
• Max Server Memory: 51200

If your hardware and settings don’t exactly match those, you may get different results. These things matter, apparently ?

Stay Curious

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You have everything you need to work along with these posts. If you have questions on anything, you can run your own experiments to try to answer your questions.

It’s not that I don’t want you to comment to ask them, but I’m not going to be checking in on stuff as regularly, and I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring you when you could be learning independently. You don’t need my permission to do that!

Over the course of the month, I’ll be talking about how queries get executed, query plans get made, along with table and index design, wait stats, and more. I hope you’ll stick with me, even this material is stuff you’re already comfortable with.

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.