October 6, 2010 at 9:01 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Persisted vs Non-persisted Computed columns
October 6, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Nice question, thanks.
Though I think formatting the code into little sections, and including the commented select statements, makes it a little more confusing and harder to read than it could have been.
October 7, 2010 at 12:34 am
Thanks for the question.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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October 7, 2010 at 1:50 am
Just one question. What's the significance of the (nolock) hint? Could you argue that none of the answers could be guaranteed in the event of a dirty read? Cheers and many thanks for the question.
GPO
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October 7, 2010 at 3:56 am
Argh didn't get it wrong because I didn't know the answer but rather because I can't seem to count this morining.:blush:
October 7, 2010 at 4:27 am
Nice question, though maybe a bit too easy.
Shame about the (nolock) hints, though. They serve no purpose, and they might lead people to believe that these hints are okay to use. They are not, except in a very limited amount of situations.
October 7, 2010 at 4:33 am
Nice question.
I was afraid it was some trick question of some exotic behaviour of SQL Server (with the no lock hints and everything), but luckily common sense was enough to answer the question.
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October 7, 2010 at 5:31 am
Hugo Kornelis (10/7/2010)
and they might lead people to believe that these hints are okay to use. They are not, except in a very limited amount of situations.
You won't believe how many people that actually use NOLOCK or READ_UNCOMMITTED to "fix" concurrency and locking problems. One of our vendors use NOLOCK in every(!) SELECT statement in a system we have purchased from them. They have never bothered to explain the reason for doing it, but my guess, after doing some investigation, is that it is caused by two things:
- Lots of missing indexes, which results in excessive scans
- Bad programming, because when I save data in the front-end, SQL Profiler showed that before the transaction for the update statement was committed, another connection from my pc was opened trying to read the updated row(s).
October 7, 2010 at 6:17 am
First - this was a very good question. Learned something today which is great.
Hugo
Shame about the (nolock) hints, though. They serve no purpose, and they might lead people to believe that these hints are okay to use. They are not, except in a very limited amount of situations.
What would these limited situations be?
Nils
You won't believe how many people that actually use NOLOCK or READ_UNCOMMITTED to "fix" concurrency and locking problems. One of our vendors use NOLOCK in every(!) SELECT statement in a system we have purchased from them. They have never bothered to explain the reason for doing it, but my guess, after doing some investigation, is that it is caused by two things:
- Lots of missing indexes, which results in excessive scans
- Bad programming, because when I save data in the front-end, SQL Profiler showed that before the transaction for the update statement was committed, another connection from my pc was opened trying to read the updated row(s).
How about thousands of connections hitting against high volume OLTP databases that are also required for up to the minute reporting where replication is not an issue nor are dirty reads?
There are times where hints are required. I may not like them as the norm, but I don't think that one should dismiss them all together.
Steve Jimmo
Sr DBA
“If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a Nation gone under." - Ronald Reagan
October 7, 2010 at 6:39 am
sjimmo (10/7/2010)
Hugo
Shame about the (nolock) hints, though. They serve no purpose, and they might lead people to believe that these hints are okay to use. They are not, except in a very limited amount of situations.
What would these limited situations be?
Mostly queries that report aggregated data for an audience that doesn't care about the exact number, but only wants an indication. If the numbers my query produces will be rounded to the nearest million dollars anyway, I can live with a result that might be a couple of thousand dollars off.
October 7, 2010 at 6:42 am
Did I ever say that this hint was never to be used? For reporting purposes where the possibility of reading dirty data does not affect the quality of the report then go ahead and use it. I've done it myself many times. What I mentioned in my previous post was misuse due to poor programming.
October 7, 2010 at 6:58 am
Good question.....lots of reading first thing in the AM.
October 7, 2010 at 7:11 am
Nice question
I am much afraid by seeing the question
post this type questions
October 7, 2010 at 7:14 am
Hugo
Mostly queries that report aggregated data for an audience that doesn't care about the exact number, but only wants an indication. If the numbers my query produces will be rounded to the nearest million dollars anyway, I can live with a result that might be a couple of thousand dollars off.
Completely agree, which is why we unfortunately use it everywhere. Our environment is very large and growing. We literally have several thousand users hitting against the OLTP databases making hourly decisions. Unfortunately we are unable to replicate all of the necessary data to other locations for them to review though it is moved to a warehouse daily which is used primarily for trending as well as market basket and many other things. Reports are happening at the same time as OLTP. I appologize if you felt that I was picking, but I just wanted to get you to expand upon your answer. Thank you.
Nils
Did I ever say that this hint was never to be used? For reporting purposes where the possibility of reading dirty data does not affect the quality of the report then go ahead and use it. I've done it myself many times. What I mentioned in my previous post was misuse due to poor programming.
Unfortunately, your initial posting read very definite and you posted the 2 reasons that you felt were the the use of locking hints. If I misread, I am sorry - but how many others?
Steve Jimmo
Sr DBA
“If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a Nation gone under." - Ronald Reagan
October 7, 2010 at 7:29 am
Ok, I can see that my comment about using NOLOCK to fix concurrency issues could be explained a bit better, and that there are legitimate reasons to use it, for example in reporting scenarios.
But I cannot see where I completely condemn the use of NOLOCK. I mentioned that one of our vendors use in in ALL SELECT statements, and most of them has nothing to do with reporting functionality. They are plain SELECTS that returns just a few rows, but because the client app is poorly programmed (as I tried to explain) the have "fixed" it with NOLOCK.
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