Categories
SQL

Deeper into Concurrency Contention

We’ve recently looked at how single threaded concurrency was handled in SQL Server and followed up last time by diving into multithreaded concurrency. This time we’re going to go a bit further with the multithreading to look more into how the contention is handled when the number of cores available doesn’t line up with our workload. We’ll also […]

Categories
SQL Server

Multithreaded Concurrency Essentials

Recently we looked at single threaded concurrency in SQL Server for workloads which only need a single core to execute. We saw how they ran at the same time with the queries effectively being round-robined on the CPU. This time out I wanted to look at how the concurrency looks when we’re working with multithreaded workloads. Setting […]

Categories
Misc

Markdown Cheat Sheet

If you haven’t seen or used Markdown before, it’s a simple way to annotate plain text in a way which indicates formatting by using specific characters. This means that you can format your text as you’re typing rather than scrolling through countless options in a visual editor such as Word. Personally I find markdown so […]

Categories
Misc

Partial Highlighting in Notepad++

Productivity is a core component of our day to day jobs in and around code. Part of that comes from the tools we use and a common one would be Notepad++ thanks to all of its handy features and plugins to extend it. One of the simplest out of the box features is the ability […]

Categories
SQL Server

Demonstrating Concurrency in SQL Server

The question for today: if we have three queries – one which takes 1 second to run, one which takes 2 seconds to run, and one which takes 3 seconds to run – how long will it take to return data for the first and last query if they all start at the same time? […]

Categories
SQL

Effectively Deploying Stored Procedure Changes

If writing code is the meat of our work then then packaging our stored procedures for deployment is the bread and butter to complete the sandwich. Deploying them is key so here we’ll be looking at options for how to effectively script those changes. The specific challenge we’re looking at here is how to change […]

Categories
SQL

More Caring, More Sharing: Handling Datasets within Sessions

When building data solutions we’ll be handling sets of data which may need to be imported, transformed, aggregated or exported amongst other things. With more complex solutions can come a need to share this data between different areas of the process. Last week we looked at being able to share individual values within a session and […]

Categories
SQL

Sharing is Caring: Exchanging Values within Sessions

When developing application code we may be familiar with exchanging data and objects through the application. This practice is much less common in SQL due to being transactional when we consider application / OLTP workloads. There are however some times when exchanging values between code in the same session which is what we’ll start to […]

Categories
SQL Server

SSMS Productivity Boost with Multi Line Editing

One of the most time consuming tasks in Management Studio is repeating the same changes across multiple lines of a query. The answer to this? – Multi Line (or Column Mode) Editing. Here’s a quick post to explain what it is, how to do it, and examples to see it in action. What is multi […]

Categories
SQL

Utilising Bit Masks with Bitwise Operators

A few weeks back we looked at options for storing multiple boolean flag values in a table. One of the options we considered was the use of a Bit Mask where we packed multiple flags into a single field. When we have individual fields within a table, using and manipulating those is straightforward. However when we’ve got […]