Book Image

Learn T-SQL Querying - Second Edition

By : Pedro Lopes, Pam Lahoud
Book Image

Learn T-SQL Querying - Second Edition

By: Pedro Lopes, Pam Lahoud

Overview of this book

Data professionals seeking to excel in Transact-SQL (T-SQL) for Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Database often lack comprehensive resources. This updated second edition of Learn T-SQL Querying focuses on indexing queries and crafting elegant T-SQL code, catering to all data professionals seeking mastery in modern SQL Server versions and Azure SQL Database. Starting with query processing fundamentals, this book lays a solid foundation for writing performant T-SQL queries. You’ll explore the mechanics of the Query Optimizer and Query Execution Plans, learning how to analyze execution plans for insights into current performance and scalability. Through dynamic management views (DMVs) and dynamic management functions (DMFs), you’ll build diagnostic queries. This book thoroughly covers indexing for T-SQL performance and provides insights into SQL Server’s built-in tools for expedited resolution of query performance and scalability issues. Further, hands-on examples will guide you through implementing features such as avoiding UDF pitfalls, understanding predicate SARGability, Query Store, and Query Tuning Assistant. By the end of this book, you‘ll have developed the ability to identify query performance bottlenecks, recognize anti-patterns, and skillfully avoid such pitfalls.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Query Processing Fundamentals
4
Part 2: Dos and Don’ts of T-SQL
9
Part 3: Assembling Our Query Troubleshooting Toolbox

Exploring query plan cache DMVs

Another set of DMVs that are helpful when troubleshooting T-SQL query performance is the query plan cache-related DMVs. While the execution DMVs we discussed in the previous section contain point-in-time information that changes frequently, these DMVs contain information about queries that are currently in the plan cache, which can contain information back to when the server was last restarted, depending on how long the query plans remain in the cache.

Note

The amount of time a plan remains in the cache depends on several factors such as memory pressure, recompilation, and schema changes. Provided that the server has been online for some time and no cache-flushing events have occurred, such as changing max degree of parallelism, or manually clearing the plan cache by running ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION CLEAR PROCEDURE_CACHE, these plan cache DMVs should give you a good idea of the overall query performance on the server.

Before describing...