SQL

Here are my unedited chapter notes:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

• Collation – current version requires BIN2 on character index columns. Best to do so at the column level. Supports only sorting, comparison and grouping. Will remove the need for case sensitive code on tables and columns but not data.
• Collate database_default to handle tempdb collation of temp objects. Research more.
• Interpreted SQL via interop useful for ad hoc or migration of code.  Doesn’t perform as well as compiled.
• Key point restrictions really show that the Hk tables need to be isolated bc of the interface between the engines. P 46

Chapter 3

Often I’m asked what is the best practice for a single SQL Server installation. Well, that is a tricky questions and the answer is it always depends. Let’s discuss what a “standard” SQL Server build looks like if you had to start somewhere. Here let’s focus on Standard edition on a physical server. Enterprise edition and virtualization are topics that can stand on their own.

**Processors – **The higher the clock frequency the better

This morning at a customer site I was researching an issue where Availability Group read-only routing was not working correctly. Quickly I was able to determine the issue was a misconfigured read-only routing URL list. In this blog post I’ll show you the requirements for read-only routing in Availability Groups, how I determined the URL list was the issue and what to do to fix the situation. The requirements for Read-only routing in Availability Groups are:

Recently,I have been working with the Debugger Symbols for SQL Server to generate call stacks and learn more about the internals of SQL Server.

I approached one of our clients about doing this on a non-production system and they thought it be great. They would get better insight on their workload, I would get access to a real workload. win..win, right? Even in their stage environment they have a pretty heavy workload so it would be a good candidate for generating call stack data.

Where to get the debugger tools

To generate the needed symbols you will need the “Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 10” download here: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/downloads/windows-10-sdk and click “Download the standalone SDK”

• I like to select the Download option and pick “Debugging Tools for Windows” this will download all of the installation files

How to install the debugger tools

The installation of this software is very straight forward, Then find in the downloaded files \Windows Kits\10\StandaloneSDK\Installers\X64 Debuggers And Tools-x64_en-us.msi and install the debugger and install the tools with the default settings.

At this fall’s SQLIntersection conference in Las Vegas I attended, Paul Randal’s (t|b)“Performance Troubleshooting Using Latches and Waits” precon. Where at he asked for some assistance compiling data for a project he’s working on. The project that would require installing the “Debugging Tools for Windows” and generating debug symbols for the SQL binaries. I have always intended to work with the debug symbols to find the call stack traces and experiment with what SQL Server does during certain events, like creating a database, inserting a row and such. These are topics that interest me as a computer scientist and a SQL Server professional and also can help our clients in understand conditions when trying to get a handle on obscure performance anomalies.