Chris Miller Blog

RocketScientist's Miscellaneous Ramblings

Actually useful BI

Kidding. Mostly. Here's another BI-type analysis tool that's probably used by more people than any other BI tool in the world. It's cloud based, it provides incredibly detailed and useful information for performance analysis and identifying areas of improvement. Read more →

IsNumeric('.')

So, anybody know why if you do this: print IsNumeric('.') it prints out this: 1 Seems that it won't convert to a float, it won't convert to an int, but it will throw lots of great errors…. Read more →

Tables, and the space they use

So I hacked around in sp_spaceused and got this sorted out. Works in SQL 2005, haven't tested north or south of that.  Share and enjoy. drop table #mainpartitionstats drop table #LOBPartitionStats drop table #totals  SELECT  object_name(object_id) name,  SUM (reserved_page_count) reserved_page_count,  SUM (used_page_count) used_page_count,  SUM (  CASE  WHEN (index_id < 2) THEN (in_row_data_page_count + lob_used_page_count + row_overflow_used_page_count)  ELSE lob_used_page_count + row_overflow_used_page_count  END  ) Pages,  SUM (  CASE  WHEN (index_id < 2) THEN row_count  ELSE 0  END  ) RC  into #MainPartitionStats  FROM sys. Read more →

COM+, DTC, and 80070422

One of our "packaged" software bits that accesses my servers is going through an upgrade right now. Apparently this software requires DTC to be installed on my SQL Server, and able to accept remote connections. Read more →

Left-duplicate indexes

At Kim Tripp's PASS session on indexing and covered indexes, she more-or-less proved that wider is better for indexes, within reason and searchability. It's better to have the index (Column1, Column2, Column3) than the index (Column1) and then a (Column1, Column2) and then a (Column1, Column2, Column3). Read more →