I recently posted some comments about some guidance offered by Microsoft when talking about the CXPACKET wait type. Nothing I said was wrong, no. But, evidently there are a few whip smart and agile people who work for Microsoft. Specifically, Rick Byham, who works for the team tasked with taking care of the SQL Server Books Online. Why am I calling Mr. Byham smart and agile. Evidently he saw the blog post and has completely updated the description for CXPACKET at MSDN:

Occurs with parallel query plans when trying to synchronize the query processor exchange iterator. If waiting is excessive and cannot be reduced by tuning the query (such as adding indexes), consider adjusting the cost threshold for parallelism or lowering the degree of parallelism.

WHOOP! That’s awesome work. Thanks Mr. Byham.

Of course, one of my best and most popular recent blog posts is now completely incomprehensible if people follow the link to MSDN, but I can live with that. Well done.

And the caution in this case? You never know who is going to read this stuff, so try to be nice when offering criticisms. I could be a little more respectful with my criticisms, especially since I’ve put my full share of mistakes and weak advice out in books, articles and on this blog. My apologies if my flippant approach ruffled too many feathers. I got two lessons out of one blog post.