Pro tip: If you are creating indexes, you have to maintain them. Inserts, updates, and deletes cause fragmentation of yo

There is plenty of nuance that an experienced SQL wizard can pull from a query plan. However, for the standard developer, what you need to know is the difference between a seek and a scan.,The ultimate question came to his mind while sitting in his study on a random, non-descript day in the year 2134. As is happens his 5-year-old son was sitting next to him. Eager to communicate the ultimate theory of everything to another human being lest he forgot, he proceeded to explain it to the child in an easily comprehensible way:,I entered AI Dungeon, planning to gently nudge GPT-3 into doing the necessary computations. My plan: I’d write the first half of a story about a man who discovers the ultimate theory of everything, but stop short of describing the theory itself, and let GPT-3 auto-complete the story.,1. Why does anything exist in the first place, rather than nothing? 2. What is the fundamental 'stuff' that makes up reality? 3. Why is our Universe the way it is? 4. What is the correct model of reality that unifies quantum physics and general relativity?,As a rule, seeks are more efficient. Typically, if you are looking to optimize a query, you should identify where scans are happening in your query and fix them. The easiest way to fix them is to make sure you’re joining on indexed fields.,It is known that the answer to life, the Universe and everything is 42. However, despite the concerted efforts of the best minds humanity has to offer, the appropriate question has yet eluded us.,Pro tip: SQL Server will let you know if you are missing an index that it could be using in your query. The suggestion will appear at the top of the query plan. If you right-click on the query plan where an index is suggested and select “Missing Index Details,” it will even generate the index creation script for you!,My father tells me a story of how he was in the grocery store the other day and saw a man walking around without a mask. “He looked at everyone he passed as though he was waiting for someone to say something. It was so wild. He was just itching for a fight. I can’t understand some people.” Similarly, I listened to an interview recently with Patty Schachtner, a senator from Wisconsin who’d had a person at a grocery store tell her to “take that fuckin’ thing off” in reference to her mask. Meanwhile, she is busy trying to prepare for the worst-case scenarios in the rural corners of her state by renting freezer trucks for when the body count overwhelms the morgues.,You have now leveled up your SQL skills! Using these concepts, you can now optimize your database and query more efficiently. Whether you are querying from an application or building out your own stored procedures and views, these tips will make your job easier!,Note how I cleverly framed the question as the tale of a scientist and his 5-years-old son: A trick to entice GPT-3 into simplifying its complex musings into an ELI5 format that even I could understand.,If you are interested in understanding database performance on a deeper level, being able to read a query execution plan is a useful skill. When you run a query, SQL Server is processing it based on an execution plan. You can generate the plan upon running your query or view a cached plan if your query has been running. This allows you to see how much time is being spent on each step in the query.,The question had eluded mankind for centuries. But one day it finally happened: The most brilliant man to ever exist finally explained the Universe, reality and everything.,The SQL statement to create an index is pretty straightforward. The following statement will create a non-clustered index with the name idx_orderdate on the given field of the Orders table:,You have now leveled up your SQL skills! Using these concepts, you can now optimize your database and query more efficiently. Whether you are querying from an application or building out your own stored procedures and views, these tips will make your job easier!,Needless to say, I was incredibly excited to find out if GPT-3 — OpenAI’s latest language model — could do what thousands of physicists, mathematicians and philosopher had failed to achieve. After all, GPT-3 had been trained on the cumulative wisdom of mankind, including all of Wikipedia and all Reddit conversations ever.