I’m writing this blog entry in response to the following comment about the article “Set-Based vs. Cursor-Based Solutions for Running Aggregates.” There was just not enough room to respond directly with a comment of my...

In one of the recent conferences I sat down with a couple of friends—Umachandar Jayachandran (UC) and Ron Talmage; we were trying to resolve a performance problem related to cursors. As UC started writing the...

This came up in a conversation I had with an attendee in the TechEd conference in LA a couple of weeks ago...

SQL Server 2005 introduced quite a few enhancements related to caching of temporary objects. You can find details about those and other enhancements related to tempdb in the paper: Working with tempdb in SQL Server...

When I need to troubleshoot execution plan reuse behavior, I find the part of identifying the right entries in sys.dm_exec_cached_plans or sys.syscacheobjects problematic. You will find recommendations to first clear...

Both the subquery and join solutions perform reasonably well for calculating running aggregates when you have very small partitions. Because the subquery-based approach requires a separate scan of the data for each...

In Optimizing a Suboptimal Query Plan (InstantDoc #94775) I described a query for which the default plan that the optimizer produced was slower than one that was forced with a hint. Recently I received comments about...

A few weeks ago the book Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Querying was sent to the printers, and it should be available in the next few days in the book stores. Like with your kids, I guess you’re not suppose...