AdaTheDev Blog

Whenever there are a number of ways to achieve the same goal, I’m always inquisitive as what the performance difference is between them. I’m a firm believer in thinking about scalability from the start - if you can make your best effort to prepare for scale, then you can save yourself time and effort further down the line. I like to try and avoid pain - it doesn’t agree with me. [Read More]

The scenario is, you want to create a stored procedure that returns the records relating to a finite set of keys/IDs that you pass in to it. How do you do it? Well you could use dynamic SQL, but for the purpose of this article I’m going to ignore that option. Test scenario -- Create basic customer table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Customer] ( Id INTEGER IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY, Name NVARCHAR(50) NOT NULL ); GO -- Populate Customer table with 100,000 sample records DECLARE @Counter INTEGER SET @Counter = 1 WHILE (@Counter <= 100000) BEGIN INSERT Customer (Name) VALUES ('Test Customer #' + CAST(@Counter AS VARCHAR(10))) SET @Counter = @Counter + 1 END Option 1 - CSV list of keys In SQL Server 2000, you would most likely have ended up passing in a CSV list of keys, splitting that out into a table, and then joining that on to your real data table to match the records to return. [Read More]

So QCon London is fast approaching, starting with 2 days of tutorials on the 8th and 9th of March, then the 3 day conference from 10th-12th. This will be my first time at QCon and I’m really looking forward to it. Having never been to many conferences in the past, the level of expectation I have is solely based on the StackOverflow DevDay in London last October. That was a great day with some very interesting (and humorous) talks, so I’m expecting even better things from QCon as it’s reputation precedes it! [Read More]

One of the things I feel I keep badgering on about in the world of SQL Server and query tuning is to be fair and consistent when comparing the different possible variants. If you don’t level the playing field, then potentially it will lead to you thinking a particular query out-performs another when in fact the opposite could be true. It’s a bit like comparing 2 paper boys to see which one can complete a given round the quickest - if one of them has been doing the round for the past 2 weeks but the other has never done that round before, then are you going to be able to reliably tell which one is actually quickest? [Read More]

Starting up a blog is something I’ve been threatening to do for some time now. There’s always a good excuse not to get round to it, even though it’s something I’ve really wanted to dip my toe into, just to see if I could cut the mustard. As it’s the start of what I hope will be a successful foray into blogging, I’m afraid this is indeed a “what do you do and where do you come from? [Read More]