SQL Server Database Consulting
This happened:
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GroupBy is a different sort of conference as it has been online since it began in 2019 (Thanks Brent! (b|t)) Sessions are voted on by the community with the top vote getters being accepted.
As part of our Virtual Group sponsorship we get to present a session, so we asked the first-runner up in the vote tally to “guest present” for us.
Jeff Moden (L), Mr. “NO RBAR” himself will be presenting “Black Arts” Index Maintenance – GUIDs v.s. Fragmentation – They’re not the problem… WE ARE!” at 22:00 UTC on May 25.
This will be a roughly 30 second “About Dallas DBAs” bit, and the rest is all Jeff.
Session Abstract:
This is NOT your typical presentation on the fragmentation problems of Random GUIDs. No… Instead we’re going to DESTROY THE MYTH OF RANDOM GUID FRAGMENTATION.
In one of the most ironic/heterodoxical turns of knowledge you’re ever likely to experience, we’ll see how THE USE OF RANDOM GUIDS CAN ACTUALLY PREVENT FRAGMENTATION! In the end, you’ll witness the results of some simple testing that clearly demonstrate that you can easily insert literally MILLIONs of rows into a Random GUID clustered index with almost no page splits (not even supposed “good” ones) and LESS THAN 1% Logical fragmentation!
We’ll identify the real problem and the seriously effective yet incredibly simple two-part fix for it. In the process, we’ll prove that Random GUIDs actually behave in a manner like most people expect a good index to behave, especially in but not limited to high performance OLTP environments as well as the benefits of doing so.
We’ll also learn how to use a new tool that I created (included in the ZIP file) to ACTUALLY SEE what an index looks like at the page level for all pages in a single graph.
Then, we’ll use that tool to lay waste to what people are currently calling “Best Practice” index maintenance. We’ll literally see what REORGANIZE does to an index at the page level and why it’s one of the very worst things you can do to your Random GUID and many other types of indexes even if you’re limited to the Standard Edition of SQL Server. We also prove that REORGANIZE CAUSES ORDERS-OF-MAGNITUDE WORSE TRANSACTION LOG FILE USAGE than REBUILD especially for Random GUIDs.
As interesting and totally necessary sidebars, we’ll also see how the use of ever-increasing index keys could be (and frequently is) a major source of many of your fragmentation problems and we’ll also see that NEWSEQUENTIALID may NOT the answer that you’re looking for.
See you there (virtually)!
Thanks for reading!
SQL Server Security Update: January 12, 2021
Microsoft has issued an important security update that affects all installations of SQL Server 2012-2019. This security update addresses an elevation of privilege vulnerability which can allow data to be sent over a network to an affected SQL Server instance that might cause code to run against the SQL Server process if a certain extended event is enabled. (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4583468/kb4583468-microsoft-sql-server-elevation-of-privilege-vulnerability)
The ”certain Extended Event” has not been disclosed at this time.
You can read the MSRC Security Update Guide document CVE-2021-1636 for more detailed information, and to learn which specific versions of SQL Server are affected by this vulnerability. NOTE: If you are running an instance of SQL Server 2012 or higher and do not find your version number listed, then your SQL Server version is no longer supported and needs an update to the latest Service Pack and/or Cumulative Update.
We recommend all SQL Server users apply this security update during the next available maintenance window to patch this vulnerability.
I’m running a poll on both LinkedIN and Twitter asking the same question. Adding it here to see how the responses vary with each audience:
What aspect of your "main" database(s) is the MOST important to your organization?
Total Voters: 1
Loading ...Thanks for responding. Feel free to comment in the comment section!
Kevin3NF
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community. It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (b|t) and this month’s edition is hosted by Kerry Tyler (b|t), who has asked us to write about “Learning From Others“, by telling about a time something went bad and how it got fixed.
I have an “In Real Life” series of blog posts that are exactly this:
Availability Group Performance
There are a couple of additional issues in the hopper, just haven’t had time to write them up.
Thanks for reading!
I live in a small town. Horses and hay fields all over the place.
I run Dallas DBAs from my home office, providing income for my family, 2 employees and several awesome people that I sub-contract work out to when needed. One of them I’ve never met face-to-face.
The technology of today makes the dream work.
I have no servers here…just 3 laptops and 6 screens. All of my software comes from SaaS providers, such as Office 365 and Quickbooks Online.
All of this came together to allow me to help someone I will never meet help HIS customer solve an issue on their production system.
I took a 3 class series of online, live courses from Brent Ozar (b|t). Once a month in December, January and February. This was facilitated by GoToMeeting on Brent’s end, Slack for the attendees to communicate questions to Brent and chat with each other, and a high powered Virtual Machine I built in Microsoft Azure, just for running really heavy workloads.
During that class I got to know one or two of the attendees pretty well, from their questions, to their funny comments, etc. There were a few that I shared Direct Messages with in Slack. I looked some of them up on LinkedIn, because I might want to catch up with them in the future. Many of the same people were in all 3 of the same classes with me. By February, it was like seeing old friends that I’ve never actually seen.
Just this week, one of those attendees reached out to me asking if I had a few minutes to spare, which at that time I did (right in the middle of a VERY busy week). We got on a Zoom call, screen-shared into his system, where he had a VPN going to connect to his customer’s Azure SQL DB.
We did some troubleshooting, used some of the things we learned in class, eliminated some possible reasons and came away with some things to test to make performance faster.
Without the technology of today, there is a zero percent chance I would ever have (virtually) met Bob, connected on LinkedIn, and been able to help. Much less actually see the problem in action.
Read back through and look at all the pieces of tech and people that made this fairly simple interaction even possible. Laptops, stable internet, live online training, LinkedIn, Slack, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Azure.
We live in amazing times.
Thanks for reading!
