[Video] Office Hours at the Petit Ermitage in LA
I went to LA for the opening week of Somni, a gorgeous restaurant in LA, and took your questions from the rooftop deck of the adorable Petit Ermitage hotel.
Here’s what we covered:
- 00:00 Start
- 00:37 MyTeaGotCold: When was the last time you did something interesting with Extended Events?
- 01:25 Josef: Our app slows under heavy load, but Task Manager shows no high CPU/memory on the DB server. Suspect network issues or heavy disk reads by SQL Server. How can I identify the root cause? Which First Responder Kit stored procedures should I use first?
- 02:17 Josef: When I have a SQL-related doubt, should I post it on the First Responder Kit Slack channel first, or directly on Pollgab? What’s the preferred approach?
- 03:12 Dopinder: What is your opinion of the GIT support added to SSMS 21? Will this finally open the SQL source control flood gates?
- 04:27 Jerry Mathers: What is your favorite query editor / management tool for PostgreSQL? How does it compare with SSMS?
- 05:28 Venkat: Once SQL Server is out of support but still used, is there any incentive to pay for licensing?
- 06:09 da5fx: Hi Brent, recently I was reviewing several SQL Server that have non critical (Dev and Test) users database on aws network file share servers. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/moderniz…. What’s your opinion?
- 06:50 TeaBA: You recently talked about what a bad idea it was to have linked servers pointing to themselves.Is the memory used by a linked server query part of the buffer pool or does it use another pool? If so, which pool is it? Trying to prove with metrics to customer what a bad idea it is.
- 08:05 Josef: You often say not to RDP into the SQL Server machine. What’s the best alternative? Do you use SSMS from another machine to connect? Are there any valid reasons to RDP into the SQL Server machine?
- 09:10 Juan Pablo Gallardo: Im usually listening to your videos using a headphone, while doing something else. I have heard so many things that now I need to go back and have no clue where to search. Please, could there be just a page with a transcript and a video reference so that we can search? please!?
- 10:35 Bandhu: Will we see an office hours from scenic China in the near future?
- 11:29 AutofileDAB: Experiencing performance issues on a SQL instance with way too many indexes, unused indexes, redundant indexes, bad database design, bad query design, etc. How do you handle customers who insist that the instance needs to be tuned but won’t change the database design or queries?
4 Comments. Leave new
hahaha, the first Jerry Mathers answer was dBeaver
Re RDP: Since working extensively remotely – largely since the pandemic – I fften resort to RDP – particularly for run long-running or critical procedures as remote broadband, and/or VPNs lead frequently to ‘auto’ dis- & re- connect with catastrophic results for whatever is running. With a number of organization I’ve worked with – this applies even if RDPing from ‘remote gateway’ servers.
Hence RDP on might come with a performance overhead – but if the server is sufficiently spec-ed it can provide a degree of extra robustness
Soon as I heard that second question about FRK, I knew submitter was going to get roasted. 🙂
Seriously appreciate all of the content you produce Brent! I have ingested so much this year and it’s made me such a better DBA.
A possible fourth performance tuning dial: clean up the data. There was this one database I worked with where the queries were slow and, as weeks and months passed, were noticeably getting slower. I determined that the queries and tables were adequately designed, and things were generally slow because the core tables each had tens of millions of rows to repeatedly go over (high-frequency querying was involved). Further analysis disclosed that much of the data was old and/or irrelevant—for years, data went in and didn’t get out. I worked up archiving and purging routines, trimmed things down, and (a) things started to run somewhat faster, (b) they stopped getting slower over time, and (c) performance of backups, checkdbs, and other background tasks also improved.
It’s not table redesign or updated hardware. Maybe it counts as query tuning, but we did so by adding new queries and routines that cleared out old data. Not a common problem, I’d guess, and convincing people (looking at you, legal team) to get rid of their precious data can be hard, but don’t discount it.