Quick NoLock with SQL Prompt

Posted on March 10, 2021 by way0utwest

First, please, please, please, avoid NoLock. You can lose data, or get strange results, as Jason Strate demonstrates (blog | video). Before you read further or try this, read his post and look at Kendra’s video.

I had a customer request an easy way to add NOLOCK to tables in SQL Prompt. This person wanted to be able to highlight a table and make this happen. Fortunately, this is easy in Prompt.

A snippet will allow you do this on demand. I’ll explain how.

First, open the Snippet manager from the SQL Prompt menu in SSMS.

2021-02-26 13_34_26-

Click “New” to create a new snippet.

2021-02-26 13_34_35-SQL Prompt – Options

When the form appears, fill it out as shown. Feel free to change the snippet code if you want. The $SELECTEDTEXT$ is the key. This allows me to have this snippet available when you highlight a table name.

2021-02-26 13_34_49-SQL Prompt - Edit Snippet

Save this, and then when you highlight a table, you can have Prompt add nolock by pressing CTRL and then typing your snippet name. It will be in the popup list.

I also have an animated gif to show this:

promptnolock

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Daily Coping 10 Mar 2021

Posted on March 10, 2021 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag. 

Today’s tip is to notice how you speak to yourself. Try to use kind words.

I can be hard on myself. If I don’t get something done that I planned, or I skip out on some activity, I get a little annoyed with myself. My long running streak was the result of this attitude, but it can be unhealthy if I don’t have flexibility with myself.

As I get older, and hopefully a little wiser, I to be more understanding of the choices I make and the benefits or costs of each. Skipping the gym isn’t necessarily a bad choice, depending on why. I’m also learning to better listen to the state of my physical and mental health on a regular basis.

As a result, I try not to berate myself, or not to denigrate myself. I’m trying to continue to push myself to be better, but understand that a step backwards at times is OK. Remind myself of the accomplishments and then encourage myself to move forward again tomorrow.

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Distributed SQL Databases

Posted on March 9, 2021 by way0utwest

One of the challenges that SQL Server, and many RDBMSes, face is scaling out. While SQL Server can grow to handle a large workload on one piece of hardware, eventually there reaches a point when a single machine cannot handle the workload.

Microsoft is trying to handle this with some new tricks. We have the Hyperscale editions of Azure SQL Database and Big Data Clusters, on premise. I don’t know that either of these will end up providing us with scale out for our OLTP databases, but they are options.

There are other options. Google has Spanner, which is a distributed SQL database and CockroachDB has attracted some attention. I caught an article that talks about some of the reasons you might look at CockroachDB, which is a cloud system, but one that gives you scale, and perhaps more importantly, lack of lock-in with a cloud vendor.

I don’t know all the ins and outs of a distributed, scalable SQL database, but I do know that scaling one table, with lots of concurrent access, can be tricky. There are improvements in bandwidth and technology that might allow things to scale well, but I can’t help but think that conflict resolution will be a challenge if many people need to write to the same rows.

I also know that often we aren’t writing to the same rows, but to the same table. Distributing that is easier, but when we start to look at lots of tables with referential integrity, I wonder how scalable this is. After all, the data needs to get committed and then written to multiple places for this to work well.

The one advantage in the cloud is throwing hardware at problems like this, often in a more cost effective way than an organization can do in their own data center. Whether this works well remains to be seen, but certainly there are customers and investors that see this as a part of the future.

Steve Jones

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T-SQL Tuesday #136–The Datatype Blog

Posted on March 9, 2021 by way0utwest

tsqltuesdayIt’s that time of the month again, and this time it’s an interesting topic. The invitation is from Iceland, where Brent Ozar has relocated for the foreseeable future. I’m slightly jealous, and wish I could go visit. I enjoy winter, and the pictures he’s posted look amazing. Definitely a bucket list trip for me.

However, this month, he’s asking about data types. Are there some you love or hate, and I’ve got a thought on this. In case you wonder, there is a list, broken into types. Apparently MS went into a “categorize everything” frenzy in the docs, which is OK, but I often don’t intuit the way they’ve broken things down. I wish they kept a long list on a page somewhere that was easy to find.

Naming Confusion

It has been deprecated, but the timestamp type is still around. It’s not in the list, but it is mentioned as a synonym for rowversion. This is a unique binary number in each database, which is often used to detect changes in a row. If you have two people editing a row, and a change updates a rowversion column, then each can detect if that value is different from the original one. Handy in terms of client side conflict resolution, which can prevent last-writer-wins scenarios for applications.

I haven’t seen it used lately, but in the 90s and early 2000s, I often saw code that checked this before letting a user make an update in some data entry application. However, this was often a “timestamp” column, which was constantly confusing to me as a DBA or developer. I kept thinking I’d get some sort of datetime stamp in there, rather than a binary value.

This shouldn’t be a problem in the future, as timestamp isn’t really doc’d, though timestamp can be found on Google searches. 

The other reason I dislike this type is that we can’t change it to rowversion. An ALTER TABLE … ALTER COLUMN doesn’t work.

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