Back when the lock manager was rewritten for SQL Server 7, and row level locking was added to the product, the procedure sp_indexoption gave us the ability to turn OFF either row or page locks or both, for one particular index, or for a table and all the indexes on it. I must admit, I rarely found this option to be the solution to any sticky ...

As with every new major milestone, one of the first things I do is check out what has changed under the covers. Since RC0 was released yesterday, I've been poking around at some of the DMV and other system changes. Here is what I have noticed: New objects in RC0 that weren't in CTP3Quick summary: We see a bunch of new aggregates for use with ...

Today on the twitter hash tag #sqlhelp, @leenux_tux asked: How can I figure out the percentage of fields that don't have data ? After further clarification, it turns out he is after what proportion of columns are NULL. Some folks suggested using a data profiling task in SSIS. There may be some validity to that, but I'm still ...

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Brad Schulz (blog) and the topic is one that should attract a lot of submissions: Procedures and Functions. Last week, I talked about the case against INFORMATION_SCHEMA views - I provided several examples where I feel the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views fall short of the catalog views, and expressed my ...

In SQL Server 2000, INFORMATION_SCHEMA was the way I derived all of my metadata information - table names, procedure names, column names and data types, relationships... the list goes on and on. I used the system tables like sysindexes from time to time, but I tried to stay away from them when I could. In SQL Server 2005, this all changed with ...

Christina Leo (@christinaleo) asked this question on twitter today: So, if I ever needed a POSH script, today is the day. Having to inventory all prod databases to find tables missing primary keys.I have a query that returns what I need, but I need a report for each of 60+ databases across 3 servers I haven't joined the ...

I often see questions about searching stored procedures, functions, etc. for specific keywords. Maybe it's an object reference they're looking for, or all of the places where they use built-in functions like GETDATE() (I once had to replace all of these with GETUTCDATE() to cater to servers where we couldn't control the time zone settings). Many ...

In KB #918992 and KB #246133, which describe how to transfer logins between instances, Microsoft recommends creating a user procedure in master called sp_hexadecimal (with no schema prefix, tsk tsk). Since I know there have been a lot of people who have created this procedure in SQL Server 2008 R2 and Denali, in spite of the fact that the articles ...

A user on StackOverflow had populated a custom schema with a bunch of tables, and needed to replace them with a new set of tables due to various changes. But he couldn't just drop them all in any arbitrary order, because there were foreign keys in place. His workaround was to just run a ''drop all tables'' script multiple times until there were no ...

This Friday is the last of my summer seminars. On August 27, I am presenting on plan caching, plan reuse and recompile and plan cache metadata. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about, because a lot of the information is not very widely known, and you can have a tremendous performance impact by making sure when plans are reused when that ...