Continuing my review of my old database designs, I stumbled upon yet another mind numbing design decision. Back then, I’d just recently learned about the whole page split problem and how you should always use sequentially valued clustered keys.

Being a proponent of carefully choosing your data types, I’ve often longed for the mediumint data type that MySQL has. Both smallint and int are signed data types, meaning their ranges are –32,768 to 32,767 for smallint and –2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647 for int. For most relational db schemas, positive identity values are used, meaning we’re looking at a possible 32,767 vs 2,147,483,647 values for smallint vs int. That’s a humongous difference, and it comes at a storage cost as well – 2 vs 4 bytes per column. If only there was something in between…

I recently had a look at the statistics storage of a system I designed some time ago. As is usually the case, back when I made it, I neither expected nor planned for a large amount data, and yet somehow that table currently has about 750m rows in it.

I recently gave a presentations on the topic of GUID usage at Miracle Open World. After finishing off my last slide and opening to questions, one of the attendees told a story of how an implicit GUID conversion had resulted in index scans instead of index seeks.

SQL Server datatypes are not always what they seem to be. Martin Schmidt recently had an interesting blog post (in danish) regarding implicit decimal conversion that sparked my interest.

Deadlocks in any database can be a hard beast to weed out, especially since they may hide latently in your code, awaiting that specific moment when they explode. An API website, exposing a series of webservices, had been working fine for months, until I decided to run my client app with a lot more threads than usual.

Yesterday I did an interview with Søren Spelling Lund for ANUG (Aarhus .NET User Group) on SQL Server Optimization, as a followup to my recent talk on that subject. He asked me an interesting question - what is the normal process of determining the need of an optimization, and how to actually do it? This is a case study from today.