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…
Deleting a Column: Meta-data-only operation
Microsoft’s SQL Server development team is constantly working to improve performance. One important performance optimization methodology that has been eminent in SQL Server for a long time has been making as many meta-data-only operations as…
Recompress Heaps
Heaps, or tables without a clustered index, suffer from a little-known problem when configured with page compression. Page compression only takes place once a page is 100% full, i.e. when no more rows can be…
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…