SQL Server | SQL in the Wild

SQL University: Advanced Indexing – Indexing Strategies

Author: Gail 11 November 2011 7 Comments

Right, I know it’s Friday and everyone’s tired and looking forward to the weekend, but I do need to finish off this indexing section and I’ll try to keep this short and interesting and hopefully keep everyone awake.

There’s no shortage of information available on how to create indexes. Hell, I’ve written a copious amount myself. Most of these many articles however are written from the point of indexing single queries. What you chose for a where clause, what has to go into the include to create the perfect index for this query. Now that’s all well and good, but I’ve never met a system that had only one query per table (maybe there is such a system out there, but I’ve never found it)

So what I’m going to try to do today is address the topic of a strategy for indexing. How to approach indexing, not for a single query, but for the system as a whole. I won’t be able to cover this in-depth, this is material worthy of an entire book chapter, if not an entire book, but I can at least touch on the essential portions.

Now, there’s two main positions that we could be in when considering indexing strategies for an entire system
1) A brand new system that’s still in development
2) An existing system that’s being used actively.

One at a time…

Indexing strategies for a brand new system

Start by choosing a good clustered index. What makes a good clustered index? Well, it depends 🙂

The clustered index is the base, it will affect each and every nonclustered index, and it’s not trivial to change once the system is in use, so chose carefully. I’m not saying another word on the subject of a clustered index, not today.

Once that’s done…

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Indexes, SQL Server, Syndication

SQL University: Advanced Indexing – Filtered Indexes

Author: Gail 9 November 2011 5 Comments

Welcome back to day 2 of Advanced Indexing. Today we’re going to look at a feature that was added in SQL Server 2008 – filtered indexes.

In versions previous, indexes were always on the entire table. An index would always have the same number of rows as the table it was built on did (which is why COUNT(*) can just scan the smallest index on the table)

With filtered indexes, it’s possible to have an index that’s built on a subset of the rows in the table. The definition for a filtered index contains a WHERE clause predicate that determines if a row in the table will be in the index or not.

This can be a major advantage on really large tables where most queries are only interested in a small fraction of the table. A normal index would be based on the entire table regardless of the fact that most of the table is of no interest, meaning the index would be larger than necessary, deeper than necessary and take up more space than would be ideal. With a filtered index on just the interesting portion of the table, the index size is kept to a minimum, meaning it’s shallower than an index on the entire table and hence more efficient.

A simple example of a filtered index would be

CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX idx_Example
ON Account (AccountNumber)
WHERE Active = 1;

There are two main uses of a filtered index:
1) Enforcing moderately complex uniqueness requirements
2) Supporting queries that filter on common subsets of a table

Filtered indexes and unique columns

One very interesting use of filtered indexes is in enforcing uniqueness over portions of a table. One requirement that come up again and again is to have a nullable column that must have unique entries in it, but whose entries are optional. Basically, the column must be unique or null. Sounds easy, but the problem is that a unique index allows only one null. So much for nulls not being equal to anything including other nulls.

Prior to SQL 2008 implementing such a constraint required computed columns, indexed views or triggers. With SQL 2008’s filtered indexes, it’s trivial.

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Indexes, SQL Server, Syndication

SQL University: Advanced indexing – Sorting and Grouping

Author: Gail 7 November 2011 15 Comments

Good day everyone and welcome to another week of SQL University. I know we’re getting close to the end of the year and everyone’s looking forward to a nice long vacation soaking up the sun at the beach, but a little bit of attention would be nice. Thank you.

This week is Advanced Indexing, and I mean advanced, none of that selectivity, SARGable, predicate stuff that gets repeated all over the place. If you need a refresher on the basics before we get started, the following can be considered pre-requisite reading for this course

There’s also some additional background material available for more enthusiastic students:

Right, now that the admin has been handled, let’s get straight into things. Nothing like starting at the deep end…

Most people would rightly associate indexes with where clause predicates and joins, after all, the main usage of an index is to reduce the rows in consideration for a query as fast as possible. However there’s another portion of your queries that indexes can, if appropriately designed, help with – grouping and sorting.

Sorting is an extremely expensive operation, especially on large numbers of rows. For the academics in the audience, the algorithmic complexity of sorting is above linear, the time to sort a set of data increases faster than the number of items in the list. The common sorting algorithms have an average time complexity of O(n log n). It’s better than O(n²), but it can still hurt at the higher row counts.

O(n²) on the left, O(n log n) on the right (Thanks to QuickMath)

Right, the non-academics can wake up now.

The other reason that sorting hurts is that it needs a memory grant to do the sort. If there’s a shortage of memory the query could have to wait a while for the memory to be granted and, if the optimiser mis-estimates the number of rows to be sorted, the memory grant could be insufficient and the sort would have to spill into TempDB. You don’t want that happening.

Finally, sort is a blocking operator in the execution plan (all rows must have been fetched from the source before any output can be returned), and so the client won’t start seeing rows returned until the entire sort has been completed. This can make the query feel like it takes longer than it really does.

Grouping and aggregation are much the same. To aggregate one set of values based on another set of values, SQL has to get all the like values of the grouping columns together so that it can do the aggregation. That sounds suspiciously like a sort doesn’t it?

SQL doesn’t always sort to do aggregations, but the alternative – hash tables – isn’t exactly free (homework exercise – read up on hash tables)

So for both sorting and grouping, the query processor’s job would be a lot easier if there was some way that it could get the data ordered by the sorting or grouping columns without having to do the work of actually sorting. Sounds impossible? No.

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Indexes, SQL Server, Syndication

24 Hours of PASS Questions

Author: Gail 27 September 2011 2 Comments

I finally found the time to work through the questions from the 24 Hours of PASS session that I did. Thanks to everyone that attended the event

Q1: Can you filter execution plans for sort warnings?

No. The sort and hash warnings don’t appear in the execution plan. You’d have to trace for the hash and sort warning events and correlate that with either batch/statement started and completed events or with the run-time plan events.

Q2: To get the query executions can you just add the statement completed or batch completed events?

The Statement Completed and Batch completed events have durations and can be filtered on that duration. The problem however is that the execution plan events (eg showplan all, showplan xml, statistics profile, statistics xml) have no duration column. Hence the execution plan events can’t be filtered on duration even though the statement_completed and batch_completed events can.

Q3: If you run a Profiler trace and all the plans are being pulled from cache will that mean that no ShowPlan event data will be shown in the trace?

Depends which event is being traced. There are events for query compile (showplan all for query compile and showplan xml for query compile) that only fire when the query compiles, so those will not fire if the plan is being pulled from cache. The other execution plan events are all fired each time the query executes.

Q4: Why can you sometimes get nulls or blank strings for the query plan from sys.dm_exec_query_plan

From Books Online:

Under the following conditions, no Showplan output is returned in the query_plan column of the returned table for sys.dm_exec_query_plan:

If the query plan that is specified by using plan_handle has been evicted from the plan cache, the query_plan column of the returned table is null.

Some Transact-SQL statements are not cached, such as bulk operation statements or statements containing string literals larger than 8 KB in size. XML Showplans for such statements cannot be retrieved by using sys.dm_exec_query_plan unless the batch is currently executing because they do not exist in the cache.

Q5: Do the execution plans from the DMVs contain execution information?

No. The plans extracted from cache contain compile-time information only.

If you enjoyed this and are going to be at PASS Summit this year, it’s not too late to sign up for the all-day precon (All about Execution Plans) that Grant Fritchey (blog|twitter) and I are doing.

SQL Server, Syndication

Compiles and recompiles

Author: Gail 16 August 2011 4 Comments

I want to spend some time over the next few months looking at query compilation and the plan cache, and there’s a couple concepts that I want to get cleared up beforehand. The first of those is around two terms that are often used interchangeably, compile and recompile.

Compile

A compile occurs when a query is given to the query optimiser and, when it does a lookup into the plan cache, no matching plan is found. The optimism must then compile the query, generating an execution plan, must add that plan to the plan cache (in most cases) and then must pass that plan onto the query execution engine so that the query can be executed. (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Cc966425)

Recompile

A recompile is something slightly different. For a recompile, the optimiser must find a matching plan when it queries the plan cache, must hand that cached plan over to the query execution engine and then while doing validation checks the execution engine must determine that then query plan is no longer valid and request the optimiser to partially or completely recompile the query. (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Cc966425)

Subtle difference. Both cases result in the optimiser generating an execution plan, but the reasons can be different. Also worth noting is that a compile results in a new plan in the cache, a recompile simply replaces an existing plan.

Another difference since SQL 2005 – a compile is for the entire batch, but a recompile can be for just a single statement within the batch.

Now the theory’s dealt with, let’s look at some examples and see how we can track these two events and try and get a better understanding of which occurs when and how they look.

The tools I’m going to use to track these are performance monitor with the compiles/sec and recompiles/sec counters and SQL Profiler with the event SP:StmtRecompile event (there’s no profiler event for compilation). I’ll also check what’s in the plan cache after each test.

The first one’s going to be very simplistic, a query run against an empty plan cache.

DBCC FREEPROCCACHE
GO

EXEC dbo.OutStandingTotalByStatus
GO

What we get from that is a non-zero value for SQL Compilations/sec (perfmon) and the following from profiler (The SQL Recompiles/sec remains 0)

and the plan cache now contains one plan with one use. (for more info on how the CacheMiss and CacheInsert events work, see https://www.sqlinthewild.co.za/index.php/2010/07/27/hit-and-miss/ and https://www.sqlinthewild.co.za/index.php/2010/08/31/come-and-gone/)

In this case, I hope it was clear, we had a compile occur (empty plan cache before, new plan added to cache).

Now what happens if, with no clearing of the cache nor anything else being done, I mark that procedure for recompile and run it again?

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Execution Plans, SQL Server, Syndication

All about Execution Plans

Author: Gail 9 August 2011 2 Comments

Coming to the PASS Summit in October this year? Excellent!

I say excellent, because Grant (blog|twitter) and I are presenting a full-day seminar on the Monday, all about execution plans. Excited already? If not, let me give you a taste of what we’ll be discussing.

Grant will be kicking things off with a look at how the optimiser works. Not 500 level deep internals (that’d take all day by itself), but an overview of how the optimiser turns this

SELECT t.Title, u.UserName, u.UserLevel, t.LastModified, t.LastPoster
FROM Threads t
INNER JOIN Posts p on t.ThreadID = p.ThreadID
INNER JOIN Users u on p.Poster = u.UserID
WHERE t.ThreadID = 42

into this

as well as some DMVs that give a view on what the optimiser is doing.

After that, I’ll be digging into what the plan cache is, how it’s structured and how plans are matched to incoming queries. I’ll also cover how you might go about monitoring SQL’s usage of the cache.

After that we’ll discuss the myriad and varied ways to get execution plans out of SQL and what the various different options for that return and what some of the terms involved really mean (estimated execution plans anyone?).

Once all that’s out there (which will probably take the entire morning) it’ll be onto the fun of reading the execution plans, what those various icons represent and what all their arcane properties are telling you. Maybe, just maybe we’ll also have a look at the raw XML form of the plan, just for fun.

And because theory’s not very useful without something to apply it to, we’ll be ending off the day by seeing how you can use the information from the execution plan to tune your queries. After all, everyone wants better performance, right?

Still not completely convinced? Then check out the 24 hours of PASS coming in September. Both Grant and I are doing a pre-con preview. I’m doing extracting execution plans and Grant’s doing a portion of the reading execution plans section.

Right, now that everyone’s dying to attend this, I’m going to toss out a little bit of a challenge. If you’re coming to our precon and you have an execution plan that you don’t understand (maybe a strange operator, maybe a property with a value you’ve never seen), mail it to me (gail@<blog domain>) with a note as to what you want clarifying and we might discuss it during the pre-con. Some rules, just to keep things sane

No confidential stuff. I don’t want legal trouble, neither do you.
If the exec plan takes 5 minutes to open in SSMS, I’m deleting it.
If it’s multiple pages in SSMS, I’m deleting it.
I don’t promise to look at anyone’s plans, it depends how we’re doing on time.

Conferences, SQL Server, Syndication

Goodbye IsNumeric hell

Author: Gail 26 July 2011 8 Comments

A well overdue feature introduced in Denali CTP 3 is that of the Try_Parse and Try_Convert functions. These are great for dealing with the something that’s frustrated SQL developers for years – data type conversions.

Let’s imagine a rather nasty case, a file with some values in it that once imported into SQL (as character data) looks something like this:

Ewww… that’s a mess. Let’s see if we can identify which of the values can be converted into a numeric data type. The function prior to Denali for that was ISNUMERIC.

SELECT ANumber, ISNUMERIC(ANumber)
FROM BadNumerics

Great, so other than the obvious one, they’re all numeric data. Time to get converting.

SELECT CAST(ANumber as Numeric(18,6))
  FROM BadNumerics
  WHERE ISNUMERIC(ANumber) = 1;

Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 1
Error converting data type varchar to numeric.

Err, so they’re numeric but can’t be converted to numeric. That’s fun. Maybe another of the numeric data types will work…

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SQL Server, T-SQL

SQLSkills Immersion training in London

Author: Gail 22 July 2011 4 Comments

Just short of the winter solstice, I bailed out of a freezing cold Johannesburg for warmer climates; well, actually for London where the weather could almost have been mistaken for a South African winter, except much wetter.

However I wasn’t going to London for the weather (fortunately), nor even for some sightseeing; I was going to London for some SQL training. Not just any SQL training, but some seriously deep training from among the best trainers in the world, one of Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp’s five day immersion courses, and immersion it most certainly was.

It gives a good feel for the intensity and depth of the course when, after all the introductions and housekeeping on the Monday morning were done, Paul started off by diving straight into the structure of pages and rows. Start slowly, where’s the fun in that? By lunchtime I had on the order of 20 pages of notes. The reasoning behind starting with that is that the internal structures come up again and again and again in the later material, so a firm understanding of how things are put together at the lowest level makes it easier to understand the features that are built on top.

The material covered is detailed on the SQLSkills website (http://www.sqlskills.com/T_ImmersionInternalsDesign.asp), so I’m not going to waste space by listing it all again. The material was all covered in incredible detail and any point could be and frequently was expanded on if any of the students asked.

On the subject of questions, there was not a single one, over all five days, that Paul and Kimberly could not answer with at most a couple of minutes of research (mostly for things like kb article numbers). Questions and comments were encouraged and often the discussions were as valuable as the main course material.

By the Friday, all the students were looking a little worn out. Paul, of course, was still as vibrant as ever, to the point of heckling (in good fun naturally) someone who crawled in late on the Friday morning.

All in all that was a fantastic experience, and that was just week one out of the four. I’d really like to thank Paul and Kimberly for coming across to London and giving people who can’t make it to the US classes an opportunity to take one of their Immersion Courses. I certainly hope that they plan to make a return visit soon.

SQL Server, Syndication

Converting OR to Union

Author: Gail 5 July 2011 8 Comments

When I looked at indexing for queries containing predicates combined with OR, it became clear that the are some restrictive requirements for indexes for the optimiser to consider using the indexes for seek operations.

Each predicate (or set of predicates) combined with an OR must have a separate index
All of those indexes must be covering, or the row count of the concatenated result set low enough to make key lookups an option, as the optimiser does not apparent to consider the possibility of doing key lookups for a subset of the predicates before concatenating the result sets.

So what can be done if it’s not possible to meet those requirements?

The standard trick is to convert the query with ORs into multiple queries combined with UNION. The idea is that since OR predicates are evaluated separately and the result sets concatenated, we can do that manually by writing the queries separately and concatenating them using UNION or UNION ALL. (UNION ALL can only be safely used if the predicates are known to be mutually exclusive)

CREATE TABLE Persons (
PersonID INT IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
FirstName    VARCHAR(30),
Surname VARCHAR(30),
Country CHAR(3),
RegistrationDate DATE
)

CREATE INDEX idx_Persons_FirstName ON dbo.Persons (FirstName) INCLUDE (Surname)
CREATE INDEX idx_Persons_Surname ON dbo.Persons (Surname) INCLUDE (FirstName)
GO

-- Data population using SQLDataGenerator

SELECT FirstName, Surname
FROM dbo.Persons
WHERE FirstName = 'Daniel' OR Surname = 'Barnes'

SELECT FirstName, Surname
FROM dbo.Persons
WHERE FirstName = 'Daniel'
UNION
SELECT FirstName, Surname
FROM dbo.Persons
WHERE Surname = 'Barnes'

In this case, the OR can be replaced with a UNION and the results are the same. The Union form is slightly less efficient according to the execution plan’s costings (60% compared to the OR at 40%), and the two queries have the same general form, with two index seeks and some form of concatenation and remove duplicates.

So in that case it worked fine, although the original form was a little more efficient
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Performance, SQL Server, Syndication, T-SQL

Are all updates split into delete-insert?

Author: Gail 21 June 2011 5 Comments

This should be another quick one.

Earlier I saw a forum post where someone asserted that SQL always executes an update as a delete of the row and then an insert of the row with the new values. Now I need another excuse to play with undocumented features, so let’s see if that’s true (or at least true for all the common cases I try)

First up, a heap, no indexes at all, an update that does not change the size of the row.

CREATE TABLE TestingUpdate1 (
ID INT IDENTITY,
SomeString CHAR(50)
)

INSERT INTO TestingUpdate1 (SomeString)
VALUES
('One'),('Two'),('Three'),('Four'),('Five'),('Six'),('Seven'),('Eight'),('Nine')

CHECKPOINT -- truncate the log, DB is in simple recovery.

UPDATE TestingUpdate1
SET SomeString = 'NotFour'
WHERE ID = 4 -- one row

SELECT Operation, Context, AllocUnitName, [Transaction Name], Description FROM fn_dblog(NULL, NULL) AS TranLog

DROP TABLE TestingUpdate1

The log operation here is Modify Row. so in this case, the update was done as an in-place update.

Second test, a heap, no indexes at all, and an update that changes the row size (however plenty free space on the page, so no issues with forwarding pointers here)

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Internals, SQL Server, Syndication