batch-mode

Perfmon counters are an excellent tool for monitoring and sometimes troubleshooting Microsoft SQL Server. But some counters can get you into trouble, because they don’t mean what many people think. Learn what to look out for in the world of widely-used perfmon counters.

If you need to add, remove, or replace hints from ad-hoc queries where you can’t change the code, plan guides can help. See a demo of removing a query hint from parameterized TSQL run from an application, and get tips on how to make your plan guides work in SQL Server.

What’s batch mode? Batch mode was introduced as a way to help SQL Server process data from columnstore indexes faster. The whole idea with columnstore is that you pull big compressed sets of rows out for aggregation or other operations in big chunks. Batch mode is a way that operators can work on a “batch” of up to 900 values at a time, instead of working on individual rows. Batch mode can reduce the overhead of metadata and make more efficient use of your CPUs.

I’ve never claimed to be great at math, but until recently I thought I knew how to count to one. Zero… one. That’s what we learned in kindergarten.

Apparently SQL Server didn’t go to kindergarten.