So I was playing today with the sparse column implementation in the latest SQL 2008 CTP, and I was specifically looking to see how this thing would work with the query processor.  I wanted to know how much information is exposed for the QP to make smart decisions when this functionality is used in complex queries with cost-based plan choices.  If the QP doesn't have the information, then sometimes the query plans will be sub-optimal because, well, garbage-in garbage-out.  While the SQL Server QP does a tremendous job at making complex plan choices compared to some of the other commercial alternatives, there are still limits on what the Optimizer can model in a reasonable amount of time.  As such, there are seams where the product tends to not work as well as one would hope.  This will always be true.  While I suppose that will also keep me employable, it is useful to understand those limits because it will help you know where to look or, if it's really hard, when to ask for help.

The SQL Server QP knows a couple of things about the data stored in a table in the storage engine:
1. How many physical pages it uses
2. How many rows it has in it (approximately)
3. Single-column statistics over a sample of the data
4. A basic notion of column interdependance to help in estimating queries with multiple scalar predicates.

From 1 and 2 it can derive the average row width.  That's useful for determining things like "how big will my sort be" if the query needs to sort.  That's a good thing - it leads to reasonable estimates for many choices in the QP.

So let's add sparse columns into the mix.  Sparse columns are useful for data with lots of NULLs.  Often this is a result of a non-traditional third-normal form database problem or, perhaps someone who is not a database person not really trying to make something into a database problem early enough in its lifecycle.  The point is that commercial database systems have a sweet spot around handling data sets with known (and small) sets of columns that can be stored in tables.  There is a TON of expressiveness available in query processors that manipulate this data because this format of data is better supported than other formats.

None of this really means that your problem is going to easily fit into a nice third-normal form system.  Often there are legacy or performance concerns that push an application away from that sweet spot.  Over time, various technologies have tried to bridge that gap (property tables, XML, and object-relational mappings).  Each of them have their own reasons to be, and I don't want to get into them in depth in my post.  I'm going to talk about how the QP deals with these from a modeling perspective.

I built two examples to explore how SQL Server 2008 reasons about sparse columns.  One example creates lots of traditional, nullable float columns while the other is exactly the same except that it uses the sparse attribute.

A few things I learned immediately:
1. Sparse columns don't change the maximum number of columns you can create in a table.  On the surface, this seems unfortunate, since it will limit the kinds of applications that can use the feature. 
2. It does seem to use less space per row.  This isn't hard, as the row format for SQL Server has a null bitmap and also needs 2 bytes per column to store the variable offset pointers.

create table sp1(aaa int)
create table sp2(aaa int)

declare @i int
set @i=0
while (@i < 990)
begin
declare @sql nvarchar(400);
declare @s nvarchar(20);
set @s = @i;
set @sql = 'alter table sp1 add col' + @s + ' float sparse'
exec sp_executesql @sql
set @i=@i+1
end

declare @i int
set @i=0
while (@i < 990)
begin
declare @sql nvarchar(400);
declare @s nvarchar(20);
set @s = @i;
set @sql = 'alter table sp2 add col' + @s + ' float'
exec sp_executesql @sql
set @i=@i+1
end

declare @i int
set @i=0
while @i < 20000 
begin
insert into sp1(col2) values (123.4)
set @i=@i+1
end

declare @i int
set @i=0
while @i < 20000 
begin
insert into sp2(col2) values (123.4)
set @i=@i+1
end

If we run "set statistics io on" and then run "select * from sp1" and "select * from sp2", you'd like to see some difference in IOs:

sp1:
(20000 row(s) affected)
Table 'sp1'. Scan count 1, logical reads 86, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 80, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.

sp2:
(20000 row(s) affected)
Table 'sp2'. Scan count 1, logical reads 20000, physical reads 1, read-ahead reads 19978, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.

Well, that's good - the sparse format on largely sparse data saves space.  We can confirm that with a quick look into the system tables:

SELECT o.name AS table_name, au.type_desc, au.used_pages
FROM sys.allocation_units AS au
    JOIN sys.partitions AS p ON au.container_id = p.partition_id
    JOIN sys.objects AS o ON p.object_id = o.object_id
WHERE o.name in (N'sp1', N'sp2')

table_name                                                                                                                       type_desc                                                    used_pages
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------
sp1                                                                                                                              IN_ROW_DATA                                                  87
sp1                                                                                                                              ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA                                            0
sp2                                                                                                                              IN_ROW_DATA                                                  20001

(3 row(s) affected)

We've now confirmed that we actually do have fewer pages.  This is also good.

Now let's see how far into the QP this extends.  Does the QP model the costs for these two queries differently?

SP1 TotalSubtreeCost: 0.08824496
SP2 TotalSubtreeCost: 14.83936

And that, my friends, is a "good thing".  This means that sparse columns are going to help your complex queries when you use a table with sparse columns in it.  The easiest way to implement this is to simply ignore the new feature in the QP, and obviously someone did a good job to make sure that it was costed properly. 

I don't believe that there are additional statistical structures to tell the QP which things are on/off row.  This will show up in a small number of scenarios (similar to how LOB data can be on/off row).  This is outside of the model for how the QP reasons about plan cost, at least from what I've seen from SQL 2008 and from what was publicly said about 2005.

Thanks all,

Conor Cunningham

So now that I have the latest CTP working again on my main machine, it's far less troublesome to go research things and post what I find.  Tonight I'll talk a little about datetime vs. date, as dates are on my mind for whatever reason.

So the "old" SQL Server datetime type only goes back to 1752, which seems very odd until you remember that current notions of date and time are really not that old.  In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII fixed the calendar because they realized that the year was actually slightly off compared to what the calendar said - each year the date of Easter ended up getting slightly further from what was intended.

Modern computer science students (at least ones who did the assignments *I* did in school :) will remember the funky rule for calculating a leap year - it is a leap year if the year is divisible by 4 but not 100 except for when also divisible by 400.  The year 2000 was just such a case, so we had a leap year then.  2100 will not be a leap year.  They had different fancy math in the original Julian calendar (as in Caesar) with a special month that happened every 377 years or so.  Later they tried to fix this because they wouldn't actually do the month every 377 years.  I promise - I'm not making this up.

By the time the figured it out, they were off by several days.  In modern terms, the OS shipped, everyone installed it, and it has a fatal bug that impacts every customer on upgrade to the hotfix :(.  So while today such bugs can put you out of business, back then the church had a bit more market power than the average customer might have today.  So, they decided to fix things.  So they changed the calendar and skipped 10 days in the process to fix the client.  Even worse, different clients (countries) installed the patch on different days, so they all changed dates differently.

It so happens that the British Empire (the "pink bits" on the old maps) adopted this in 1752.  That's almost 200 years after the Pope did his thing.  So, since SQL Server was first done in the US, Jan 1. 1753 is the first legal date because all of the math before that is simply dizzying.  Alaska actually didn't switch until the late 1800s since Russia controlled it before that, and the Orthodox calendar celebrates its Christmas as Easter later than those in the West because of this very issue. 

So if I try this with the old datetime type, I get:

create table datetbl(col1 datetime)
insert into datetbl(col1) values ('17510101')


Msg 242, Level 16, State 3, Line 1
The conversion of a varchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.
The statement has been terminated.

So I figure I'll try this out on the new date type:

create table datetbl2(col1 date)
insert into datetbl2(col1) values ('17510101')

(1 row(s) affected)

Well, the legal date range is listed as 0001 to 9999.  So let's check the math and see what happens...

create table datetbl3(col1 date, col2 date)
insert into datetbl3(col1, col2) values ('17510101', '17530101')
select DATEDIFF(dd, col1, col2) from datetbl3

731

Well, it does not appear that they skipped too many days there.  They even added a leap year since 1752 is divisible by 4 but not by 100 except for 400.  So instead of 730 we get 731.

I looked at Books online, but so far I haven't found any reference to the difference in the DATEDIFF function or in the discussion of valid ranges.  While I am sure that a number of people will not care that much and will mostly just want to use historical dates mostly with low precision, it's still important to make sure that a core system does calculations correctly.

Perhaps they will add a comment into BOL or a warning for datediff and other function uses around the various switch points for dates.  Perhaps not.  However, it's important for you, the programmer, to know the issues when dealing with old dates.

I originally learned about all of this stuff in detail when I reverse-engineered the SQL Server Expression Service Code while I was building SQL Server for Windows CE/SQL Mobile/SQL Server Compact Edition/whatever it is called now.  I've found this area to be fascinating because it takes something we take for granted and just slaps you in the face a few times.  I hope you have a bit more insight now as to the 1753 date limitation and perhaps will go crack open that history book :).

Thanks,

Conor Cunningham

Well, I was able to get things to finally install using the information from my previous post and using a named instance (different from the default instance I used previously).  So, while I'd still like to track down the keys that define an installation instance with enough detail to remove them, I think I've gotten close enough that others should be able to use this as a template to avoid an OS re-install.

I'd like to extend a HUGE thank you to the Microsoft SQL Server Setup Dev Team who spent time looking at this problem and providing a workaround for me.  Please accept my gratitude.

I am sure that they are hard at work getting setup ready to RTM, which will include problems like the one I've seen. 

So, please post up if you have other questions about what I did - I'll answer them if I can.

Thanks,

Conor

You may recall my previous posts on my trouble with SQL 2008 CTP6.  I've made some progress on fixing my machine that I thought I'd share with you.  I now get past the following error:

D:\temp\sqlctp6\servers>setup
The following error occurred:
MsiGetProductInfo failed to retrieve ProductVersion for package with Product Code = '{00E75F61-A126-4CE1-90B8-42295052F1AC}'. Error code: 1605.

I useded the SysInternals (err, Microsoft) Process Monitor Tool and watched for keys found/not found during the failed install.  This found a few keys in HKCR\Installer\UpgradeCodes that were being found early in the setup100.exe process.

(Fair notice - modifying the registry on your computer is your problem, not mine :).

So take the key:
00E75F61

Reverse it.  I think I had 615fe700, but it was late and I was tired.  It might have been 16f57e00.  Anyways, you will see some keys under HKCR\Installer\UpgradeCodes.  There are actually 2-3 places in the registry searched for each key  I've been killing all three of them for each key - there are about 7-10 keys.  The registry section looks like this:

The hex digits you have in the error will correspond to the right hand side of this picture.  The key I've been deleting is it's parent, which is the key being opened in the "key found"/"key not found" stuff in the process monitor log.

Here's what the log looked like for me:

136791  11:53:49.4922341 PM      setup100.exe    2812       CloseFile              D:\temp\sqlctp6\tools\setup\sqlrun_bids.msi                SUCCESS             

136793  11:53:49.4923712 PM      setup100.exe    2812       WriteFile              C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\Log\20080313_2353\WOPR_20080313_2353_Detail_ComponentUpdateSetup.txt SUCCESS                Offset: 7,591, Length: 62

136795  11:53:49.4956628 PM      setup100.exe    2812       RegOpenKey                HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\Managed\S-1-5-21-2888934283-224128331-3030229123-1000\Installer\UpgradeCodes\87674BD65E9A5D1409951D671E37BDA4          NAME NOT FOUND         Desired Access: Read

136796  11:53:49.4957796 PM      setup100.exe    2812       RegOpenKey                HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Installer\UpgradeCodes\87674BD65E9A5D1409951D671E37BDA4      NAME NOT FOUND                Desired Access: Read

136797  11:53:49.4958199 PM      setup100.exe    2812       RegOpenKey                HKCR\Installer\UpgradeCodes\87674BD65E9A5D1409951D671E37BDA4 SUCCESS              Desired Access: Read

136798  11:53:49.4958553 PM      setup100.exe    2812       RegEnumValue                HKCR\Installer\UpgradeCodes\87674BD65E9A5D1409951D671E37BDA4 SUCCESS              Index: 0, Name: 16F57E00621A1EC4098B249205251FCA, Type: REG_SZ, Length: 2, Data:

136799  11:53:49.4958960 PM      setup100.exe    2812       RegOpenKey                HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\Managed\S-1-5-21-2888934283-224128331-3030229123-1000\Installer\UpgradeCodes\87674BD65E9A5D1409951D671E37BDA4          NAME NOT FOUND         Desired Access: Read

136800  11:53:49.4959398 PM      setup100.exe    2812       RegOpenKey                HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Installer\UpgradeCodes\87674BD65E9A5D1409951D671E37BDA4      NAME NOT FOUND                Desired Access: Read

136801  11:53:49.4959604 PM      setup100.exe    2812       RegCloseKey                HKCR\Installer\UpgradeCodes\87674BD65E9A5D1409951D671E37BDA4 SUCCESS             

136802  11:53:49.5146648 PM      setup100.exe    2812       RegOpenKey                HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\Managed\S-1-5-21-2888934283-224128331-3030229123-1000\Installer\Products\16F57E00621A1EC4098B249205251FCA        NAME NOT FOUND         Desired Access: Read

Now the installer gets past this and tries to install the engine and then fails, but I will call this progress ;).

Notice - I had deleted all of my physical files for SQL Server from the machine, so killing the registry keys seemed like a reasonable next step.  I can't promise you it's a good idea since I don't have things working yet, but I hope this helps the many of you who mailed me and found me via search engines.

Thanks,

Conor Cunningham

Well, I spun the wheel of database topics I have here in my room, and today I think I'll talk about updates and views.... specifically inserts through non-indexed views.  Since I haven't blogged about this previously, I'll start at the beginning.  There are many, many update topics, so don't feel left out - comment if there's an update topic that interests you and I'll get to it.

UPDATEs are challenging for different reasons than SELECT statements.  While a SELECT statement can have huge combinatorical challenges in terms of the number of different plan choices to consider, UPDATEs often have a relatively small number of plan choices but instead have a number of very difficult performance tradeoffs about which kind of plan tweaks will cause the plan to finish the fastest.  You can imagine that there is a labor tradeoff between making a system work really well for SELECT plan exploration and making a system that can handle all of the detailed tweaks for UPDATE plans - most things are neutral, but getting that last 10% of performance out in one area may impact the other's ability to innovate.  So, balance is required on the part of the database implementor.

So if I were building my first database engine and I wanted to update a base table (a "heap"), I may have the following:

create table z1 (col1 int, col2 decimal, col3 nvarchar(100));
insert into z1 (col1, col2, col3) values (1, 2, 'i like cheese')

So if I implement my storage engine with a series of equally sized pages, I can probably figure out how to load each of them into memory and look for a place to store a record that's a linearization of (1, 2, 'i like cheese') on disk. 

Let's start making things more complex.

create table z2 (col1 int primary key, col2 decimal, col3 nvarchar(100));
insert into z2 (col1, col2, col3) values (1, 2, 'i like cheese')

So if I add a primary key, this is implemented in SQL Server as a clustered index.  This replaces the heap.  So, now to build my own storage engine that does this I'd have a B-Tree implemented and I would find the right place in my B-Tree to insert my new record.  I may need to split some pages to make things fit.  Here's the plan in SQL Server:

  |--Clustered Index Insert(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[z2].[PK__z2__357D0D3E03317E3D]), SET:([t1].[dbo].[z2].[col1] = RaiseIfNullInsert([@1]),[t1].[dbo].[z2].[col2] = [Expr1003],[t1].[dbo].[z2].[col3] = [Expr1004]), DEFINE:([Expr1003]=CONVERT_IMPLICIT(decimal(18,0),[@2],0), [Expr1004]=CONVERT_IMPLICIT(nvarchar(100),[@3],0)))

This is nice because there is still just the one structure to manage.  I just load it up, insert my row, and I am a happy man.

Now, I'll blog some other day about what happens with multiple indexes and such - today I want to talk about inserts against views, as this has lots of nasty details in its implementation.

create view v1 as select col1, col2, col3 from z2 where col2 between 2 and 100

ok, so I've added a view against z2 that shows a subset of the rows.  That's not too bad, or is it?  Well, if I insert/update the base table, my plan is the same as before, so that's easy enough.  However, if I try to run an insert against the _view_, what should happen?  The view isn't stored anywhere.  However, in this case, there is a single table underneath it and the rows from the base table can be "mapped" up through the view, so perhaps I could reverse that operation and translate a request to update the view to be an update against the base table. 

insert into v1 (col1, col2, col3) values (1, 2, 'foo')

  |--Clustered Index Insert(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[z2].[PK__z2__357D0D3E03317E3D]), SET:([t1].[dbo].[z2].[col1] = RaiseIfNullInsert([@1]),[t1].[dbo].[z2].[col2] = [Expr1003],[t1].[dbo].[z2].[col3] = [Expr1004]), DEFINE:([Expr1003]=CONVERT_IMPLICIT(decimal(18,0),[@2],0), [Expr1004]=CONVERT_IMPLICIT(nvarchar(100),[@3],0)))

Hey, that's pretty neat - SQL Server performs an insert against the base table that looks very similar to what we saw before.  Very nice of them :).

Ok, let's talk about the case when the row doesn't meet the filter:

insert into v1 (col1, col2, col3) values (3, 250, 'foo')

  |--Clustered Index Insert(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[z2].[PK__z2__357D0D3E03317E3D]), SET:([t1].[dbo].[z2].[col1] = RaiseIfNullInsert([@1]),[t1].[dbo].[z2].[col2] = [Expr1003],[t1].[dbo].[z2].[col3] = [Expr1004]), DEFINE:([Expr1003]=CONVERT_IMPLICIT(decimal(18,0),[@2],0), [Expr1004]=CONVERT_IMPLICIT(nvarchar(100),[@3],0)))

Hrm.  Well, that seems to work too... The ANSI committee got this far when working on their ANSI SQL specification, and they added a neat little keyword "with check option" that allows inserts, updates, and deletes against views to make sure that the resulting row would continue to be exposed through the view after the change before it is allowed.

create view v2 as select col1, col2, col3 from z2 where col2 between 2 and 100 with check option


insert into v2 (col1, col2, col3) values (1, 250, 'foo')

So if we run the same query as before against this view with "with check option" defined, we get this crazy looking plan:

What's all this then?  Well, some of this requires a few more operators of the day before I can fully explain the plan.  However, in this case it's doing the following:

1. create a dummy row that has the values you want to insert into it. 
2. insert it into the clustered index.
3. perform a check to see if this row matches the filter condition(s)
4. Assert that the check succeeded.  If not, fail the query and roll back the transaction.

All of that from a harmless little insert statement...

Well, let's do something else that is theoretically invertable and see how far this support goes:

create view v3 as select col1 + 1 as a, col2, col3 from z2 

insert into v3 (a, col2, col3) values (1, 250, 'foo')

Msg 4406, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Update or insert of view or function 'v3' failed because it contains a derived or constant field.

So I claim that this could be supported as an updatable view type because the domain of col1 is integer and the scalar expression on it is invertable.  Unfortunately, none of the vendors really support this to my knowledge.  So, instead of it being a straight reference to a column in z2, we could create an expression that is the proper query needed to make the view v3 consistent by inserting a different row into z2. 

I've done two operators - basically the two easiest ones in any query processor.  However, lots of different operators can be supported and have some set of rules about invertability that can be used to perform inserts, updates, and deletes against them.

So that's scratching the surface on updates.  I'll try to post up a few more entries on different parts of the system, but I hope you've learned something today about how view updatability is implemented.

Thanks,

Conor

So while I hope that I've demonstrated that I can say some interesting things about database engine design and implementation, I also want to post blog entries on the design of data-driven applications, as this is a topic I've been pondering a lot lately.

I'll start with something that seems completely off-topic that isn't...

So for Christmas I bought my wife an "experience" - She's always liked Ms. Pac-Man, so I figured that I would find a way to let her play anytime she wants.  I also didn't want a big, bulky arcade machine in the house - those things give off lots of heat and moving them isn't much fun.

I eventually settled on buying her an X-Arcade Joystick, hooking that up to a HTPC connected to my Television, and getting MAME set up to play it on an emulator.  My wife also likes q-bert and is getting quite good at it ;).

My wife and I also have a 2-year old daughter who is already smarter than us.  While we were playing this game, my daughter enjoyed watching the "videos" (the intermission videos played after level 2, after level 5, etc).  She thought they were wonderful - but she also got upset when we couldn't get to a video.  Eventually I started getting into the 3rd map in the game (after the second video), which for all you too young to remember looks like this:

So this is the "cranberry" level, and my daughter has cried because I can't get to the  level when I play.  I never would have expected to have disappointed my daughter for not playing a video game well enough, but it goes to show you that her expectations _start_ in life at a much higher level than mine will ever be.

She believes that I should always be able to get to the cranberry level (and stay there for as long as she is remotely interested).  She also believes that she can watch any television show at any time - she's never had to live without Tivo... I know I can't go back, but to her it must seem like we're living in the trees and grunting or something.  She also believes that pocket calculators are telephones, and she tries very hard to call my parent's cat on my wife's calculator when she gets ahold of it.  It *is* very funny, but honestly how far off is it?  Most cell phones have some calculator built into them now.  Why not the other way around?

As I've been outside of Microsoft for a bit, I am fortunate to get to see things from a different perspective.  If you think about it, databases haven't really changed that much in awhile.  SQL has been around a long time, and the core features get better each release but the paradigm in the server doesn't change much at all.  The UI tools certainly haven't changed - Access 2008 or whatever it is called will probably look a LOT like Access95.  SQL Server Management Studio is still basically a listview of objects and a query window.  Database tools are an area where I am trying very hard to go back and think more like my daughter - why CAN'T I get access to all of my data with a single query?  Why can't I backup my data more easily?   Sure, there have been various advances (XML, LINQ, ER Queries, Hibernate, S3, that Cloud SQL Server that got announced last week), and some of them are very cool, but how many of those do I expect to be around in 20 years?  How many really make my life better?  If you take a moment and think about it, there's a lot of complexity in today's systems, and the often don't "just work" unless you spend a LOT of money getting someone to write custom software for you - even then, it might not work that well when you get done.

So, I'll challenge you - remember that day you got your first Tivo - remember the day before that.  What is the one thing that you're going to do to make something that cool?  If you write setup, how are you going to make that better?  If you write a database tool, why am I going to LOVE that tool like I would a Tivo?  Don't make me post up pictures of my daughter crying - I'll do it!  Get out there and make something cool.  We'll all be happier if you do.

Thanks,

Conor Cunningham

So as you proceed up the river into the jungle, searching for answers about how the query optimizer works, I'll ask you one question: Did you know that there's actually a lot of stuff that the Optimizer team just tells you?  It's in the product, and I'm constantly suprised by how little attention they get.  You can learn all sorts of things by looking at the data.  Now, not all of it is documented, but that's usually just because one needs leeway to change the internals rather than some deep, dark secret that needs to be kept.

Now that you're hooked ;), I'll tell you a bit about an optimizer DMV called sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info.  It tells you all sorts of things about how your querys are optimized.  It's a bag of counters for all sorts of things that, with a trained eye, can give you lots of insight into what is happening.

This guy is actually documented, at least partially, on MSDN. 

(That's from my SQL 2008 install, btw).

Some of these fields are "undocumented".  search 0, 1, and 2 are in that category.  I won't talk about them except to say that the names aren't really obfuscated too much. 

To learn about a particular query, you find a nice, quiet server and:

1. select * from this table, store the results somewhere
2. optimize a query of interest,
3. select from this table again, then compare the current totals to the originals.

I think that this is one use of this DMV - trying to figure out why a query takes a long time to optimize.

The other use of the DMV is to get a good statistical picture of a running system.  Say that I'm a DBA and I want to know how many queries in my application have hints or _need_ hints to work well.  Well, this will tell you.  Granted, it doesn't separate recompiles from compiles, and if you have a system where plans are getting kicked out of the cache things may be a bit skewed, but I can tell you that this is far better than simply guessing.  Often the DB application developer doesn't realize that they've built an application that requires a lot of hinting or a lot of compilations, and you can see this in more detail than you get with the performance counters.

I've already talked about "trivial plans", which are not documented in this DMV but are widely known in the other outputs of the system.  I'll let you guys guess about the search 0, 1, and 2 stuff - if you can back up your guess with a public post, book, or other form of comment I'll confirm if you get it right.

Have a great weekend, ya'll.

Conor Cunningham

I've been mostly working with a very kind soul from the SQL Server Installer Dev Team trying to fix my box.  So far my luck hasn't been too good, but I'll keep at it.

Things that are interesting to post if you have a blog and go through the same exercise that I did:
* which versions of CTP4/5? and CTP6 did you install - x86 or x64 - the registry keys are different.
For me, I think it was the x86 versions in both cases on my Vista Ultimate x64 box.

I learned that the version isn't really visible in the resource fork you can see for the setup.exe, which in hindsight is something I will do if I ever build another installer ;).

I'll write up some query stuff soon - send me a mail if there's a topic that causes you to lose some sleep and I'll see if there is anything interesting to say on it.

I'm also trying to put together a posting about my experiences with Ms. Pac-Man and my 2-year old daughter.

Conor

After fighting off a cold all week, I've had some more time to go play with CTP6 on my secondary machine.

Today we'll do some experiments to see how the Optimizer picks plans for filtered indexes.  This will help you figure out how to build your database schemas and queries to take advantage of this new kind of index.

I was involved in the inception of the idea to build filtered indexes into SQL Server, but I didn't have anything to do with the implementation.  So, what I'll cover today is just me playing with a feature to see what it can do. 

I thought that it would be good to play with disjoint ranges and see whether they can be "covered" by a filtered index.  In my last blog post, I covered how a basic, single range case *is* covered by a filtered index when the predicates match up correctly.  In this post, I'll try multiple ranges to see what happens.

Same database setup as before (just a table with wide rows and enough rows to make index choice obvious to the optimizer):

use t1

create database t1
use t1
drop table t1
create table t1(col1 int, col2 nchar(2000), col3 time)

create index i1 on t1(col1) where col1 > 5 and col1 < 20



create index i1 on t1(col1) where col1 > 5 and col1 < 20
declare @p int 
set @p =0
while @p < 20000
begin
insert into t1(col1) values (rand()*10000)
set @p=@p+1
end
create index i2 on t1(col1) where col1 > 25 and col1 < 40


OK I added a second index over a different range in the same column.  This is not a case that the 
SQL Server 2005 optimizer had to handle.

query 1: a query with a disjunction (OR) of ranges (BETWEEN/AND).
select col1 from t1 where (col1 > 5 and col1 < 20) or (col1 > 25 and col1 < 40)
  |--Table Scan(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[t1]), WHERE:([t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1]>(5) AND [t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1]<(20) OR [t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1]>(25) AND [t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1]<(40)))

Hrm.  Well, there doesn't seem to be code in CTP that does index unions for cases like this, unfortunately.
Hinting isn't an option either because the index hint code returns an error if the hinted index does not
completely cover the index.  On my machine, I get:

(43 row(s) affected)

 SQL Server Execution Times:
   CPU time = 47 ms,  elapsed time = 2661 ms.

That elapsed time is mostly reading pages off my IDE drive.  To be clear, this is the _cold cache_ time, 
which means that I ran "DBCC dropcleanbuffers" before my run.  This throws out all of the buffer pool 
pages and forces a read from disk.  One assumption in the costing model for the SQL Server QP is that the
pages are _not_ in memory already (and there are cases where this becomes interesting).  For this example,
it just means that we have a big table scan with lots of IOs to do (and is therefore slow).

Second example: IN lists
select col1 from t1 where col1 in (6, 7, 8, 26)
  |--Table Scan(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[t1]), WHERE:([t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1]=(6) OR [t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1]=(7) OR [t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1]=(8) OR [t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1]=(26)))

Well, this is consistent.  IN is generally just a list of ORs as far as the QP is concerned.  Runtime for this query should be very similar to what we saw in our last example:

(7 row(s) affected)

 SQL Server Execution Times:
   CPU time = 63 ms,  elapsed time = 2708 ms.

OK, so what's an enterprising SQL developer to do?  Well, you can rewrite the query as a UNION ALL as long as you know that the ranges are disjoint and cover the predicate properly.

select col1 from t1 with (index=i1) where (col1 > 5 and col1 < 20) 
union all 
select col1 from t1 with (index=i2) where (col1 > 25 and col1 < 40)

SQL Server parse and compile time:
   CPU time = 0 ms, elapsed time = 0 ms.

(43 row(s) affected)

 SQL Server Execution Times:
   CPU time = 0 ms,  elapsed time = 0 ms.

That's a lot nicer.

I have no idea if this is something that they intend to add for this release of the product.  I'm not really even sure how common this is.  How often do you want to apply a disjunction of ranges to multiple partial indexes where you don't want to create an index over the whole table?  No clue.  If you have such an example, I'd love to hear about it - drop me a line at conor@sqlskills.com

In the meantime, this is just a post on something interesting I learned while playing with the new CTP6 for SQL Server 2008 that I thought you might like to know.

Happy Querying!

Conor Cunningham

(I got CTP 6 running on another machine, so I'm working except for parallel plans now since it's only a single-proc.  You guys will have to wait on that operator of the day article for now :)

Kudos to my former teammembers for getting filtered indexes into CTP6.  It's pretty darn neat, and I'll show you a few tidbits that are interesting.

So, filtered indexes are not really a new "feature" in some sense.  You can do everything in a filtered index with an indexed view.  Of course, indexed view matching is only supported in the Enterprise edition of the software, so perhaps not everyone has seen those benefits. 

Indexed views are a tricky feature - generalized tree pattern matching is hard (read: CPU expensive), and if you've looked in the BOL the list of restrictions is so long that reminds me of filling out tax forms.  However, the other side effect that occurs when you have indexed views is that the optimizer has to go through additional phases of its search in order to apply them.  The optimizer has a couple of buckets of rules it can run, and most plans find a nice plan in the first or second round of rules.  Generalized indexed view matching is restricted to the last set of buckets, which usually means that there are a lot more rules that have to run before that view can be matched.  The bottom line is that the compilation cost isn't bad for a single query (usually), but it's the sort of thing that can make the difference between an application that can be used in UI response-time requirements or not.

Enter the filtered index.  This is a recognition that there are a lot of indexed views that don't need tons and tons of fancy equations, joins, etc.  These are single-tabled views that have simple predicates.  Once you get into this ballpark, you can bolt this on to the super-efficient index matching code and you can enable a whole new class of application from what you could build previously.  This is why I am excited about this feature.

I haven't looked to see where this feature will fall into the SKU matrix yet, and I'm sure that they're still pondering that very question.  However, you guys should play with this on CTP6 - it's nifty!

So, first things first.  Let's build one of these guys and see if we can match it:

create database t1
use t1
drop table t1
create table t1(col1 int, col2 nchar(2000), col3 time)

create index i1 on t1(col1) where col1 > 5 and col1 < 20
declare @p int 
set @p =0
while @p < 20000
begin
insert into t1(col1) values (rand()*10000)
set @p=@p+1
end

ok so I've filled this table up with a lot of useless data and created a nice little filtered index.

select * from t1  where col1 > 5 and col1 < 20

  |--Nested Loops(Inner Join, OUTER REFERENCES:([Bmk1000], [Expr1007]) OPTIMIZED WITH UNORDERED PREFETCH)
       |--Compute Scalar(DEFINE:([Expr1006]=BmkToPage([Bmk1000])))
       |    |--Index Scan(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[t1].[i1]))
       |--RID Lookup(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[t1]), SEEK:([Bmk1000]=[Bmk1000]) LOOKUP ORDERED FORWARD)

select * from t1  where col1 > 5 and col1 < 10

  |--Nested Loops(Inner Join, OUTER REFERENCES:([Bmk1000]) OPTIMIZED)
       |--Compute Scalar(DEFINE:([Expr1006]=BmkToPage([Bmk1000])))
       |    |--Index Seek(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[t1].[i1]), SEEK:([t1].[dbo].[t1].[col1] < (10)) ORDERED FORWARD)
       |--RID Lookup(OBJECT:([t1].[dbo].[t1]), SEEK:([Bmk1000]=[Bmk1000]) LOOKUP ORDERED FORWARD)

so in the first example I've created a query against the table that directly matches the index condition.  It matches and even generates an index scan (slightly faster since it doesn't have to navigate down the b-tree to start returning rows).

The second example is interesting because is a proper subset of the index.  The indexed view matching code can do subsumption as well.  It generates a seek in this case and returns only part of the filtered index.

Both cases do RID lookups back to the heap since I did SELECT * and the index is not "covering".

The other data point I'll leave you with this evening is that the showplan_xml has something interesting in it:

StmtSimple StatementText="select * from t1 where col1 > 5 and col1 < 10" StatementId="1" StatementCompId="1" StatementType="SELECT" StatementSubTreeCost="0.0474183" StatementEstRows="7" StatementOptmLevel="FULL" StatementOptmEarlyAbortReason="GoodEnoughPlanFound" ParameterizedText="(@1 tinyint,@2 tinyint)SELECT * FROM [t1] WHERE [col1]>@1 AND [col1]<@2">


Well, there are two interesting things.  First, StatementOptmLevel=FULL means that we didn't get a trivial plan.  There is a parameterized text field, but I don't think that is being used here.  these two queries are showing up as different plans in the plan cache (and obviously they have different plans). So, absent forced autoparam, I don't think that trivial plan is working on these guys.  This makes sense since there is a cost-based plan choice.

That's it for me tonight guys.  Happy Querying!

Conor

PS: Thanks for all of the comments and posts trying to help me get back to a working state.  I've tried many of the suggestions without luck, but I'm going to try playing with the orca tool, perhaps tomorrow or so, to see if I can get my main machine back up and working.

oh well.  I've spent a fair amount of my day attempting to manually hack out a lot of the various registry keys associated with SQL Server 2008 in the hopes of upgrading from the November 2007 CTP to the Feb 2008 CTP on my main machine (Vista x64 box).  Since I received questions about whether I've gotten this to work, I figure I'd blog about where I am so you can compare with your own experiences.

Bottom line - No luck.  Here's the error I'm at now:

D:\temp\sqlctp6\servers>setup
The following error occurred:
MsiGetProductInfo failed to retrieve ProductVersion for package with Product Code = '{00E75F61-A126-4CE1-90B8-42295052F1AC}'. Error code: 1605.
Error result: 0xEEBAE95A
Result facility code: 0x6BA
Result error code: 0xE95A

I've learned a number of things - specifically that the non-SQL Server core Engine pieces have TONs of registry keys.  It seems that they took a shotgun and reserved a fraction fo the registry - SQLDMO and the DTS engine components seemed to be big offenders.

Either way, I'm getting blocked by my old friend the Windows Installer aka MSI.  Funnily enough, I've killed every key like this in the registry.  I'm also watching (via procmon.exe) and it's not asking for a registry key like this.  So, I guess MSI has stored something away in another data store and I haven't been able to find that to clean it up.  I've never had much patience for that thing.

I guess I'm in a bit of a reflective mood right now, as I am basically unable to install a product I had some hand in helping to write.  Certainly it's a beta, and I'm not upset that it has bugs in the installer per se - I'm willing to accept that.  What I'm less willing to accept is that the system can get into a state that is so obviously *&%$$%ed up and from which there is no real recovery path.

Let's look at where things failed here:
1. MSI storing information outside of the registry that impacts whether it runs or not (ie whether I can install or not).  No documentation on what to do when things get away from the good case.
2. GUIDs - customers don't care about them.. I don't care about them.  I can't remember numbers that long.  Why am I dealing with this?  I'm happy if you give me a number that I can pass to some other program, but this one seems not so useful.
3. The error message is not "actionable".  What do I do to fix this?  Where should I read additional information?
4. The "Error result" in this example.  Now, most people would have given up and called support... Instead I said "I should read up on this API and see what it says".  So I google for it (because loading help takes SO darn long and it asks me all sorts of privacy policy and other nonsense before I can get what I want AND it's not installed, of course ;) and I find the MSDN page on it - great.  It says nothing about this.
5. On the MSDN page, the errors are only listed using the C header literals - no hex codes on the page. grrr.  The installer didn't translate it for me back to the constant in the help page.
6. So I fire up Visual Studio 2008 and go to the error lookup tool, and I enter this code.  No good - it's not listed anywhere.  That seems bad.
7. I go back to the MSDN page, figure out that I should look in MSI.H.  Luckily, I have the Vista Platform SDK installed, so I go find that file.  Then I determine it's not even listed there either.
8. google on the error code by itself yields nothing of interest

So I'm left asking "Why is all of this so hard?".  The bottom line is that it SHOULDN'T be. 

Application design is an important aspect of any system.  As systems get more complex, it obviously becomes more challenging to make everything work.  It's important to determine the various use cases for your program, whatever it is, and then determine how you are going to manage the customer experience through all the steps of that process.  Here, the installation process failed on multiple levels and through multiple components.  The experience should be "your installation failed.  Here's how you can clean it up".  Even if that requires manual steps (it *is* a beta), there should be a path and at the end of that path should be a happy customer with a working computer installation.

I'm obviously left with options like "reinstall my OS", "install a VM" (which I won't do because I play games on this machine), or "find another machine for CTP6", which may be what I end up doing.

Conor finds himself longing for the days of .ini files all of a sudden.  he also apparently finds himself speaking in the third person about himself ;).  the old days of INI files would have been pretty easy to fix a failed install - "delete this directory and reinstall".

I hope this helps the others having trouble with CTP6 installation.  I'll see what I can do tomorrow to get a machine set up with SQL 2008 CTP 6.

Conor Cunningham

Well, my dev box is in a bad state now - can't install the new CTP and I had to start manually hacking on the old one.

I may have to install SQL Server 2008 CTP 8 on a VM or on another machine.

So, I apologize for delays in posting up examples to answer your questions.

The lesson of the day is that one should just not trust installers anymore ;).

Conor

One of the earlier comments I received asked about costing of T-SQL and CLR functions.  More specifically, they want to know how they are costed and why it is so low.

Let's create a motivating example.  I'll create a table with some size to it (I add a binary(2000) column to make each page take at least 2000 bytes, and this means that about 4 rows fit on a page.  So, if I add 100,000 rows to a table, we're talking about enough IOs to show up in the costing functions).

use t1

create table t3(col1 int, col2 binary(2000))
insert into t3(col1, col2) values (2, 0x1234)
insert into t3(col1, col2) values (3, 0x1234)
declare @p int
set @p=0
while @p < 100000
begin
insert into t3(col1, col2) values (rand()*1000, 0x1234)
set @p=@p+1
end


create function f3(@p1 int) RETURNS int
BEGIN
  return (select count(col1) from t3 where col1=@p1)
END

select dbo.f3(2)

(I apologize for my lack of real-world examples.. After you've done this a few thousand times you resort to the shortest names you can type ;).

ok, so we have a table and we create a T-SQL scalar function that just runs an aggregate to find the number of occurances of a particular value in the table.   Since there are no indees on t3 this will be a table scan and it will read lots of pages into the buffer pool.

So let's look at the costing output for each of the elements of this query.

Above is the plan for the base query (select dbo.f3(2)).  It emits a dummy row from a constant table and then does a "compute scalar" operation to run the function and generate a 1 row, 1 column result.

That cost doesn't look so big...

Now let's look at the plan for the scalar subquery (well, the top of it since we're looking for the total cost)






Well, the laws of physics appear to be violated. 

You can try whatever cost query you want in the function - unfortunately, these aren't really costed in the SQL Server QP (at least through 2005 and what I have seen so far on the 2008 CTPs).  Back when SQL Server 7 was being created, scalars were generally always cheap and they really didn't need costs.  There's a small amount of CPU cost added in a compute scalar and that generally worked for OLTP plans.  As SQL Server started being used in larger and larger scenarios, this issue started to manifest.

As SQL Server has added more features, some of them can be arbitrarily expensive and this issue can show up in plan selection as a problem.  Areas where you are likely to see this are T-SQL functions, CLR functions, string functions on varchar(max) and friends, and I'm sure that there are others.  However, it's worth noting that this won't be a problem in a lot of cases, and often workarounds are possible that may even be better design choices than doing what I've done in this example.  I don't recommend that you "hide" subqueries in scalar functions like this precisely because the optimizer can't see and cost them properly, even if they are as simple as this one.

There are a few tricky problems in "fixing" this (costing the scalar functions in line with their runtime).  First, this isn't exactly the sort of thing that people are going to beat down the gates at Microsoft to get fixed.  However, it is an area where the model doesn't work right, and when a customer does hit this they are often very far into a deployment or POC and can't exactly redesign their application easily.  Second, there are actually lots of really complex things that happen with the placement of computescalars and how they are evaluated in the optimizer and execution engine.  Finally, the SQL Server QP is set up to do relational transformations (A join B is equivalent to B join A, etc.), and the computation fo scalars isn't really a true relational operation in this algebra.  This makes true costing of compute scalars always something that is different than costing a join or a filter.  Third, changing the costing of such a basic operator will probably impact the plan selection for basically EVERY query, as their costs will change slightly - that's a big risk to fix a "little" bug. The last tricky bit in fixing this has to do with the way that T-SQL functions like this get exposed into the optimizer.  Not all queries really have known costs a priori.  The example function that I've given you does have a fixed cost, under some definition, but if I start putting procedural logic into the function, then the actual executed path depends on the runtime data, and that means that the cost is based on something you haven't interpreted yet.  So, there are some at least reasonable explanations as to why this issue persists to this day.

So my advice is that if you have cases where your scalar functions are undercosted and you think it impacts plan selection, then you need to contact Microsoft and let them know.  I have seen some cases of this, but I think that it's perhaps not the most common problem and that might have some impact on whether it gets addressed in the future.  I *guarantee* you that the people who work there are highly skilled and passionate about solving customer issues, as I worked with them, so I suspect that if there's enough squeaky wheels then this is something that may be addressed.

Your other option is to send me money, I guess ;).

I hope that gives you a bit of background on the issues you need to know when examining your query plans when you have expensive scalars in them.

Conor Cunningham

ok so I haven't written anything about statistics yet on the blog, and Paul fielded a question from someone asking about details of the statistics implementation in SQL Server.  Luckily, I know a little bit about that.

So, this post will cover the published background material that I think everyone should read about SQL Server's statistics implementation, and then we can have a more detailed conversation about the nitty gritty fun details of them.

So this was written for SQL 2000 but the basic details apply to SQL Server 2005 and 2008.  I'd read this first.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa902688(SQL.80).aspx

There was an additional white paper written for SQL Server 2005 that covers the new features that were added.  Lots of extensions where we refined the features from 2000 and made them work more effectively.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/qrystats.mspx

If you have questions about statistics, feel free to post them up.  If you wish to question statistics, then well I guess you should start with DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS. 

Conor Cunningham

So I like kung-fu movies.  I don't care how bad the acting is, as long as there is some master/relative/friend who has been killed who needs avenged.  Often good movies are made this way.

In software, a good idea often comes out of getting tired of seeing bugs on a sore subject, often not even your fault.  So, in a fit of rage, I locked myself in my office for a few weeks and came up with the streaming table-valued function, since used as the proverbial duct-tape within the QP for all sorts of unforseen features.  However, it has a "walking on rice paper without leaving footprints" vibe, so I will tell you a bit about this guy ;).

(I did the QO part for this operator and a chunk of the architecture for it - there were others who worked on it too, however).

So a query operator takes rows in the bottom and spits rows out the top (yes, none of the exposed query plan graphs are drawn this way, but that's how people talk about it ;).  Some operators take more than one input - most of the ones with 2 inputs are called "joins".  Some can take an arbitrary number of inputs (usually called UNIONs).  Some take parameters (Compute Scalar).  most don't take parameters, however.

After you've done the 10 or so common operators in a query processor, there's a lot of specialty problems that don't really fit well into those operators.  So people end up trying all sorts of crazy paths to get the data they need out to customers.  Exuberence can often cause a few bugs, however, so eventually something needed to be done.

So, the "Streaming Table Valued Function" (STVF) is a relational operator (takes in rows and passes out rows).  In this case, it takes in some number of scalar parameters (like any good function) and spits out zero or more rows.  The beauty of this operator is that anyone can program anything to get returned, as long as they return back rows - it's like a user-defined operator for internal folks to write features for customers.  Amazingly, ther