Investigation
Unexpected Blocking during the Indexed View Creation
Creating the clustered index on an Indexed View blocked unrelated queries even under RCSI. The cause was Enterprise view matching, fixable with EXPAND VIEWS.
Notes from a TSQL trench
Database stuff,
with a side of memes.
Long-form notes on TSQL performance, Extended Events, Query Store and the tooling around them. Written from the trenches, not the slide deck.
Featured
Latest posts
KDA: Echoes of Deception - Onboarding
A walkthrough of the Kusto Detective Agency UI and the onboarding challenge - finding which detective earned the most bounty money in 2022.
Kusto Detective Agency - Intro
I have a soft spot for Kusto. This series walks through the Kusto Detective Agency challenges - data mysteries you solve with KQL instead of a magnifying glass.
Deploy at Low Priority
A utility script for deploying schema changes without a maintenance window - using a time-based loop, lock checking, and GOTO to minimize blocking on busy SQL Servers.
Why is fn_xe_file_target_read_file the worst SQL function?
A rant about fn_xe_file_target_read_file - the nvarchar(max) return type, broken time filtering, and the circular dependency for finding rollover files.
Finding nested references
Your stored procedure calls another procedure, which calls a view. How deep does it go? Here's a recursive CTE that traces the full dependency chain, including cross-database references.
Database CI/CD Basics (T-SQL Tuesday #177)
A crash course on database CI/CD: source control as the source of truth, state-based vs migration-based versioning, and the many moving parts of automated database deployments.
Service Broker Blocking
I was paged for a blocking chain where the lead blocker had a transaction name I'd never seen: CSbRollbackHandlerTask::DisableQ. Here is how I reproduced it and why the blocked process report refuses to help.