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Unlocking Interoperability: A Guide to Foreign Data Wrappers in PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL AWS RDS

Unlocking Interoperability: A Guide to Foreign Data Wrappers in PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL AWS RDS As a database professional, I often encounter scenarios where data is fragmented across various systems. In today's distributed IT landscape, it's not uncommon for critical business information to reside in different databases, perhaps an on-premise PostgreSQL instance for legacy applications, […]

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Life's Little Frustrations

As with others, I've had to deal with death in the family recently. Some other family members are dealing with cancer (a few friends too). Happily none of us has recently been a disaster zone, but that's happened too. So yeah, big, nasty scary stuff happens in life. However, for most of us, most of […]

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Databases and Disasters

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When INCLUDE Columns Quietly Inflate Your Transaction Logs

In this article, I wanted to test a common assumption we DBAs make – that adding INCLUDE columns to indexes is harmless. I created a FULL recovery test database with a realistic wide Orders table containing extra large VARCHAR columns to simulate an ERP workload. I ran updates and measured transaction log backup sizes before and after adding INCLUDE columns to a nonclustered index. The results shocked me. The update without INCLUDE columns generated a 10 MB log backup, while the same update with INCLUDE columns produced over 170 MB – a 17x increase in log volume. I explain why this happens: INCLUDE columns are physically stored in index leaf rows, so updates affecting them write bigger log records. I also clarify that updating key columns generates even more log than INCLUDE updates because it involves row movement (delete + insert), but INCLUDE updates still cost more log than if those columns weren’t indexed at all. The takeaway is clear – INCLUDE columns are powerful, but they silently increase transaction log generation, impacting backup sizes, replication lag, and DR readiness. Always measure their real cost before deploying to production.

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Create an HTML Report on the Status of SQL Server Agent Jobs

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We Should Demand Better

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item We Should Demand Better

Estimated Rows

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Estimated Rows

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Question of the Day

Estimated Rows

I have two calls to the GENERATE_SERIES TVF in this code: 

SELECT   TOP 10 gs.value
FROM     GENERATE_SERIES(1, 10) AS gs
ORDER BY NEWID ()
OPTION (RECOMPILE);
go
DECLARE @a int = 10;
SELECT   TOP (@a) gs.value
FROM     GENERATE_SERIES(1, @a) AS gs
ORDER BY NEWID ()
OPTION (RECOMPILE);
In the actual query plans, what is the estimated number of rows for each batch?

See possible answers