MSDN Product Feedback Center

As you can see in a post from yesterday there is a nice website that enables you to send suggestions to Microsoft.

Check it out here

Those darn statistics

Recently I had this funny query which ignored and index although it seemed very useful to me. Normally I don't question the query optimizer too much but this time I was really sure.

I tried a UPDATE STATISTICS WITH FULLSCAN on the index and all of the sudden my query started to use the index.

Statistics on indexes are always created with fullscan because SQL Server has to scan all of the data anyway. This counts for newly created indexes and reindexing. As far as I can see auto statistics update is always performed by sampling the index or table.

Time for some more testing tomorrow! :-)

Product Suggestions

I got around to submit a product suggestion to Microsoft (for SQL Server 2005).

I loved the shortcut to 'Manage Indexes' from the query plan to create some temporary indexes for performance testing. It was a very handy feature that made performance tuning a bit easier. I've submitted a suggestion here (go vote!)

I'm also following 2 other suggestions. One being the complete 'Script As' script with DROP and CREATE statements, check it out here.

Finally there is the very unhandy 'feature' of not being able to load scripts in the current connection and database context, check it out here.

It seems I'm a bit conservative and want isqlw features back :-)