Articles

SQLServerCentral Article

Unmasking CXPACKET and CXCONSUMER in SQL Server: What Your Execution Plan Isn’t Telling You

This article dives deep into cxpacket and cxconsumer in sql server, explaining how to simulate each, when they appear, and why they matter. Using live execution plans, wait monitoring, and worker thread diagnostics, we uncover how uneven parallelism triggers thread sync waits—and how SQL Server sometimes hides real issues behind innocent-looking CXCONSUMER waits. Includes step-by-step queries, tuning tips, and a real-world scenario where repartition streams quietly ruined performance.

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2025-07-07

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External Article

State Transition Constraints

About two decades ago, I introduced the concept of transition constraints to show Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. In October of 2008, I did an article called Constraint Yourself! on how to use DDL constraints to assure data integrity. One of the topics in that piece was a look at state transition constraints via an auxiliary table.

2025-07-07

SQLServerCentral Article

Parameterize Connections in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory using Variable Libraries

Building pipelines in Microsoft Fabric can be complicated, and it's easy to write code that is hard to maintain. Using parameters in your connections helps to build pipelines that are easily configured.

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2025-07-04 (first published: )

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External Article

Data Encoding Schemes

Your choice of how you encode data can be significant. With computers and databases, you have a wide range of options. As a programmer, you will likely be called upon at some time in your career to design and coding scheme for particular application. It would really help if you at least avoided designing a bad one.

2025-06-30

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Question of the Day

A Quick Restore

While doing some testing of an application, I wanted to reset my environment after doing some testing with this code: 

USE DNRTest

BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak'
GO
/*
Bunch of stuff tested here
*/RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACE
What happens if this runs, assuming the "bunch of stuff" isn't anything affecting the instance.

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