Category: Cursors

Local Variables In Cursors

Posted on by Erik Darling

Work Off

While helping a client out with weird performance issues, we isolated part of the code that was producing a whole bunch of bad plans.

At the intersection of bad ideas, there was a cursor looping over a table gathering some data points with a local variable in the where clause.

For more background on that, check out these posts:

One might expect the query inside the cursor to be subject to some special rules, but alas, nothing good comes of it.

Eau de Sample

To repro a little bit, we need to create a certainly suboptimal index.

CREATE INDEX p ON dbo.Posts
    (OwnerUserId);

If you have a lot of single key column indexes, you’re probably doing indexing wrong.

Full demo code is at the end because it’s a bit long, but the end result is five query plans that all share the same bad estimate based off the density vector.

The worst of them looks like this:

Occurling

And the best of them looks like this:

Gruntled

Over and Over

If you’re getting bad guesses like this over and over again in any loop-driven code, local variables might just be to blame.

That guess of 10 rows of course comes from  this calculation:

SELECT 
    density = 
        (
            1 / 
            CONVERT
            (
                float, 
                COUNT(DISTINCT p.OwnerUserId)
            )
        ) *
        COUNT_BIG(*)
FROM Posts AS p

Which, with a little bit of rounding, gets us to the estimate we see in the query plan:

hectic

Thanks for reading!

Demo Code

SET STATISTICS XML OFF;
SET NOCOUNT ON;

DECLARE 
    @CurrentId int;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS #UserIds; 

CREATE TABLE #UserIds 
(
    UserId int PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
);

INSERT
    #UserIds WITH(TABLOCK)
(
    UserId
)
SELECT
    u.Id
FROM dbo.Users AS u
WHERE u.Reputation > 850000
ORDER BY u.Reputation DESC;


DECLARE counter CURSOR 
    LOCAL STATIC
FOR
SELECT 
    UserId 
FROM #UserIds;
 
OPEN counter;

FETCH NEXT FROM counter 
    INTO @CurrentId;

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN 
   
    SET STATISTICS XML ON;
    
    SELECT
        p.PostTypeId,
        c = COUNT_BIG(*)
    FROM dbo.Posts AS p
    WHERE p.OwnerUserId = @CurrentId
    GROUP BY p.PostTypeId
    ORDER BY c DESC;
    
    SET STATISTICS XML OFF;
 
FETCH NEXT FROM counter 
    INTO @CurrentId;
END;

CLOSE counter;
DEALLOCATE counter;

 

Error Handling In Cursors

Posted on by Erik Darling

Spit My Last Error

If you wanna play with the code I used to try things out on your own, here it is:

CREATE TABLE zero_ten (id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY);

INSERT dbo.zero_ten ( id )
SELECT 0 AS id
UNION ALL 
SELECT TOP (10) ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY 1/0)
FROM sys.messages AS m

SELECT * FROM dbo.zero_ten AS zt;
RETURN;

DECLARE c CURSOR LOCAL STATIC FOR
SELECT N'DECLARE @atmosphere INT; SELECT @atmosphere = 1/' + RTRIM(zt.id)
FROM dbo.zero_ten AS zt;

DECLARE @joydivision NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'';
DECLARE @errors TABLE
(
    id INT PRIMARY KEY IDENTITY,
    error_number INT,
    error_severity INT,
    error_state INT,
    error_message NVARCHAR(MAX)
);

OPEN c;
FETCH NEXT FROM c
INTO @joydivision;

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
    BEGIN TRY
        RAISERROR(@joydivision, 0, 1) WITH NOWAIT;
        EXEC sys.sp_executesql @joydivision;
        FETCH NEXT FROM c INTO @joydivision;
    END TRY
    BEGIN CATCH
        INSERT @errors ( error_number, error_severity, error_state, error_message )
        SELECT ERROR_NUMBER(), ERROR_SEVERITY(), ERROR_STATE(), ERROR_MESSAGE();
        --FETCH NEXT FROM c INTO @joydivision;
    END CATCH;
END;

SELECT *
FROM @errors AS e;

CLOSE c;
DEALLOCATE c;
GO