Performance of CAST vs CONVERT
This post is a follow-up to my prior post inspecting the performance of PARSE vs CAST & CONVERT, where we see that PARSE is an order of magnitude slower than CONVERT. In this post, we’ll…
PARSE vs CAST and CONVERT
T-SQL often provides multiple ways to “skin a cat”1 as they say. In this post, we’ll take a look at two “interesting” ways to convert dates and times from character-based columns into a column using…
Compress Big Tables
Storing data in SQL Server can be expensive. Not necessarily because disk is expensive; it isn’t and is generally getting cheaper all the time. Data costs money because it consumes RAM, requires CPU resources to…
Page Life Expectancy and Data Throughput
Page Life Expectancy, or PLE as it’s often referred to, is a measure of how frequently the average page of memory is evicted from the buffer pool. PLE is measured in seconds, and is the…
Memory Consumption by Object
SQL Server caches object data in memory in the buffer pool. Understanding memory consumption by object can be crucial for performance. For instance, you may have a large logging table consuming 90% of the buffer…
Slow inserts across a linked server?
Linked Servers offer a great way to connect two SQL Servers together, allowing remote querying and DML operations. Frequently, this is used to copy data from production to reporting. However, the temptation is to run…