Take the SQLChallenge: Tuning a Stored Procedure

on August 16, 2018

I’ve just published a new SQLChallenge course for subscribers, and I think it’s one of the best ones yet.

Update: this course is now totally free. :smile:

Your mission is to:

  1. Identify which statement is slowing down our stored procedure the most
  2. Tune the code to speed it up. You can change the query that is slow as well as anything else in the procedure that will help you make that statement faster.

In the solution videos, I’ll step through multiple strategies to figure out which statement in the procedure is slowing it down the most – because in real life, you need to have a whole bag of tricks in different situations. 

Solution scripts and videos include demos of:

  • Trace flag 7412, how it impacts sp_WhoIsActive, and live query plans
  • Finding the slow query in Query Store - with TSQL as well as the graphic reports
  • Finding the slow query in the plan cache
  • Methods of rewriting the procedure to tune the query
  • Additional code patterns that make tuning procedures simpler.

The challenge script in the first lesson creates a database on your test instance – no need to restore anything – so it’s fast to get going.

Get started here.

Watch all the videos, or just what you need

The course has an hour and ten minutes of videos, each one of which is 15 minutes or less.