keep it fresh. keep it fun
Occasionally we do as we are told. And when Brent Ozar tells us that we should celebrate the first T-SQL Tuesday of 2017 by writing about SQL Server bugs and enhancement requests, the only appropriate response is “What color, sir?”
Continue reading “#TSQL2SDAY: Sing a song of unsigned ints”
While researching my previous post on latch promotion, I came across an odd piece of magic that made me do a double take. And sleep on it. And tear out my hair. I took it on faith that this is more likely a clever algorithm than a brain fart, but I could not stop asking myself repeatedly…
The piece of code in question is really simple, involving the maintenance of the BUF structure’s breferences member, which notionally is a count of how many times the page has been touched since the page’s counters were last reset.
Continue reading “How SQL Server counts page refs without counting”
Since the year dot, SQL Server’s native Datetime type has given us a resolution of 300 ticks per second. With the introduction of Datetime2 and DatetimeOffset in 2008, we now get up to 100ns resolution. For those who like the finer things in life, this appears to be cause for rejoicing.
Fun observation: if 100ns corresponded to 1 inch, 3.3ms translates to just over half a mile. That’s a pretty big difference in accuracy. Or should that be precision? Hmmmm, here’s a can of worms.
Continue reading “Milliseconds 10, ticks 3”