John Jones and Ray LaMarca of NetApp came to the Chicago PASS Chapter tonight, and John did a presentation about storage performance. One of my measures of a good performance is the number of questions asked during the presentation, and John’s presentation was definitely a winner there. Lots of good questions.
John recommended that everyone use [...]
In the final part of my SQL University serries, I talk about the nightmares of storage: why things change when we’re not looking and why virtualization makes it harder to keep an eye on things.
In part 2 of this series, I cover magnetic hard drives, solid state drives, and RAID arrays. I explain the pros and cons of each, and I discuss their relative speeds.
In part 1 of a multi-part series, I talk about what SQL Server stores, why your data and transaction files are usually best kept on separate drive arrays, and why cache doesn’t always help.
Storage Area Networks (SANs) can do multipathing, but what does that really mean? I explain the differences between failover and performance load balancing, and talk about why active/active multipathing isn’t what it seems.
In the beginning, God made drives directly attached to our computers. Over time, man decided to get jiggy with it and use Storage Area Networks. Learn why pathing is so important to these two systems.
I just flew out to Tucson to film my sessions for the upcoming SSWUG Virtual Conference. It’s a pretty cool setup – SWUG has a full blown TV studio in their offices, and it’s really professional. (Trust me – I know when something’s unprofessional.)
The best way for me to explain it is to show you [...]
SQL Server Links
Find Missing Indexes in Stored Procedures – Michelle Ufford, aka SQLFool on Twitter, shows how to set up a T-SQL script that will regularly monitor your server for any query plans in the cache that are missing indexes, and store that data in a table for later retrieval. See, the dynamic management views [...]
I don’t talk about hardware much here, but an SSD review hit Engadget this morning and made me take notice. Fusion-io gave their new 80gb ioDrive to TweakTown for a review, and -
Wait, hang on. Don’t close the browser yet. I know, everything about this post reeks of some tiny manufacturer with borked products and [...]
Jason Massie and I had a steel cage blogmatch about whether to configure a SAN with shared or dedicated drives, and we both passed out for exhaustion.
This debate is starting up again but with a slightly different spin: virtualization. In an environment with Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX, more than one SQL Server may have [...]
Pop quiz: should you be worried if your SQL Server’s page life expectancy is averaging 214? There’s only one correct answer: it depends.
Performance tuning is all about finding the RIGHT bottleneck, focusing on it, and fixing it to the application owner’s satisfaction. Learn what happens if you don’t do it right.
Read More »Erika’s friends call her “Fancy Feast” because she only likes the best things in life. She’s got champagne tastes, but we can’t afford to buy the best of everything. I recently picked up a coffee table from Ikea, and it got me thinking about SQL Azure.
In a perfect world, I’d have on-premise SQL Server for every database. I’d use cutting-edge storage and cluster everything. But this isn’t a perfect world…
Read More »I get a lot of questions from people who want to get a better job. They want to know if certification, training, or branching out will help them get the job of their dreams. These things just aren’t the real answer.
The answer is simple: the Buddy System. Learn why.
Read More »In high school, I threw a huge party in Grandma’s house. It had long-lasting implications – among other things, I got disinherited.
Learn why SQL Server data compression has a lot in common with me after that Jungle Juice bash.
Read More »When my Grandpa Ozar wanted to find out if his 10 megabyte 5.25″ hard drive was responding fast enough to handle his database loads, he monitored the Perfmon counter Physical Disk: Disk Queue Length.
Things have changed since Grandpa’s time, though, and now it’s time to learn a new performance tuning trick – SQL Server waits.
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