SQLBits 2024

How to Conduct a Transact-SQL Code Review

Learn a collection of important best practice for Transact-SQL code and how to integrate them into your code acceptance testing for better performance and efficiency.
Modern database administrators have many responsibilities, including perhaps their most important responsibility of performance tuning. Performance tuning takes many forms. It might include tuning server settings, improving database designs, or even extensively tuning queries and query code. This becomes even more important when database workloads moved to the cloud because poor performance increases consumption of resources like CPU, memory, and IOPS.

In this session, we’ll teach you how to conduct a Transact-SQL code review that avoids a variety of common anti-patterns frequently used by junior developers who don’t know much about SQL Server. We’ll also share a collection of scripted checks to run against your SQL Server/Azure SQL database to reveal issues lurking within your application’s stored procedures, user-defined functions, and triggers. The design review is scripted and doesn’t require developers to explain their code. A portion of the scripted checks are best when run against a database at rest. But other scripts within the library are best run in an active database to see if the workloads expose any anti-patterns in flight.

Join us to learn these tips and techniques to improve not only your personal skillset and that of the teams you support, but also gain the potential to vastly improve your SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance.