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Year: 2013

Excuses for Slow Databases That Don’t Hold Up

Last Updated September 9, 2013

You’re making excuses. The database application is slow, and you’re throwing something under the bus, but we’ve got bad news. Changing it probably isn’t going to make your server faster. Here’s some of our favorite excuses. Kendra SAYS, “Your Problem Isn’t GUIDs.” Unique identifiers may or may not be globally unique, but they are one…

Rebuild or Reorganize: SQL Server Index Maintenance

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Index Maintenance, SQL Server

Index maintenance compacts a structure *and* changes physical order– both can be important! Editors Note: this post was updated in June 2014 to link to an online index rebuild bug that can cause corruption. Once up on a time, there was a database server with 500GB of data and a heavy read workload of dynamic…

Five SQL Server Settings to Change

Last Updated July 24, 2019

Jeremiah Peschka

Configuration Settings

SQL Server ships with sane defaults, right? Well, sort of. SQL Server ships with pretty sane defaults for a single CPU socket server or for a development work station. Honestly, the defaults are good enough for many things, but there are a few gotchas. Changing these settings is quick, relatively painless, and can result in…

How to Get Your Manager to Pay for Training

Last Updated August 29, 2013

SQL Server, Videos

When us geeks want something, we just point at it, look at our manager and say, “I want this. Buy it for me.” Oddly, it doesn’t seem to work. To get what we want, we have to think like a manager. Step 1. Define a user’s Pain Point. You need someone else on your side…

Common SQL Server Clustering, AlwaysOn, and High Availability Answers

Last Updated March 22, 2019

Always On Availability Groups, Clustering, SQL Server

Our live webcast topic this week was Q&A – you could bring any HA/DR questions, and we could avoid your answers. Just kidding. Here’s the webcast – we apologize for the audio, WebEx is still getting their act together. It cleans up after the first couple of minutes. And here’s the questions we couldn’t get…

Query Plans: Memory Grants and High Row Estimates

Last Updated January 8, 2019

Execution Plans, Memory Grants, SQL Server

SQL Server needs to have a reasonably correct estimate of how many rows your query is going to handle. If it doesn’t, things can go terribly, terribly wrong. Most often, the problem is that SQL Server under estimates its work. In this case, the query optimizer thinks it has just a little bit of work…

What is the CXPACKET Wait Type, and How Do You Reduce It?

Last Updated August 13, 2021

SQL Server, Wait Stats

When you query sys.dm_os_wait_stats, or check your waits with sp_Blitz® or sp_BlitzFirst®, one of your biggest wait types is probably CXPACKET. Let’s talk about what’s really going on. Our SQL Server Stand-In: a Class. Who wants to help me scan the sales table? Pretend that you’re a schoolteacher in a classroom with a couple dozen students.…

My Five Favorite That Conference Memories

Last Updated August 22, 2013

Last week, I went to summer camp for geeks, and I had a great time! That Conference is a three-day, developer-focused, family-friendly technology conference. Camp was held for the first time in 2012. I heard such great things about it from last year’s campers that I decided to go this year! The sessions focused on…

Introduction to SQL Server Failover Clusters (video)

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Clustering, SQL Server

You’d love to know how to make your SQL Servers more highly available, but you’re just not sure what “clustering” is all about. We can help! In this 30 minute video Kendra Little shows you how failover clusters make your SQL Servers easier to manage. She uses diagrams and drawings to teach you the strengths…

The Stages of Performance Tuning

Last Updated August 18, 2013

Performance tuning is a weird art to learn, because you do it in public. Sure, you may puzzle over a technical problem at your desk or revise code on your own– but when it comes to really tuning hard problems, 99% of the time you’re doing it with other people. That’s the nature of real…

SSD RAID Load Testing Results from a Dell PowerEdge R720

Last Updated December 9, 2018

Hardware, Load Testing, Storage

We’ve got a client that does big batch jobs every day, loading hundreds of gigabytes of data or more in short bursts. They were frustrated with slow performance on the batch jobs, and after we performed our SQL Critical Care® with ’em, it was really clear that their hardware was the bottleneck. They were using…

How to Use HP System Management Homepage

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Hardware, SQL Server

One of the big reasons you spend big money on server-quality hardware is to get cool stuff to make administration easier. Each hardware vendor provides their own software tools – Dell includes OpenManage, IBM includes Director, and HP includes their System Management Homepage. To illustrate how it works without violating anybody’s NDAs, I picked up…

How to Master SQL Server Index Tuning in One Step

Last Updated August 12, 2013

I’m going to tell you a secret. Index tuning is complicated, but it’s something you can become great at. You just need to practice it regularly. Here’s that one step: stop thinking index tuning is a problem for Future You. That’s it. Really. If you read this headline and didn’t skip the post, your job…

I’m ThatExcited about ThatConference

Last Updated August 10, 2013

A peek into my slides for ThatConference I about to head out to a vast waterpark in the Midwest to ThatConference, where I’m going to hang out with 1000 developers, their families, and some wild animals. I’m giving a session Monday called “How to Make Deploying Database Changes Fun Again”. I’ve had a blast distilling everything…

One-Line Romantic Stories of SQL Server

Last Updated August 1, 2013

When they finally sat down to define their relationship, he was stunned to discover that he had a child table. … Her love was like Transparent Data Encryption: sure, he felt a sense of security, but someone else had waltzed in the front door and stolen her heart. .. He always knew she’d run away…

What?! Queries are Failing in My SQL Server?

Last Updated May 2, 2015

Help is on the way I came across an interesting case recently where queries were failing in a high transaction SQL Server. We knew that queries were occasionally failing with error severity 20 because SQL Server Agent alerts were periodically firing. However, those built in alerts don’t capture exactly what has failed– they just say…

AlwaysOn Availability Groups: The Average of its Parts

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Always On Availability Groups

Business is booming; the sales team is bringing in more business and the software developers are successfully scaling out at the web server tier. There are signs of pressure on the database tier and you realize that it’s time to scale out. You’re using SQL Server 2012, you need to improve performance, and the first…

Trivial Optimization and Missing Indexes in SQL Server

Last Updated May 12, 2019

Indexing, SQL Server

Recently, Jes asked the team an index tuning question: “If a query has an index hint in it, will the optimizer ever suggest a missing index for that query?” I immediately loved the question because I’d never really thought about it before. I typically think of index hints as being a very risky game and…

SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition Sucks, and It’s All Your Fault [UPDATE]

Last Updated March 26, 2014

Every release lately, Microsoft has been turning the screws on Standard Edition users. We get less CPU power, less memory, and few (if any) new features. According to Microsoft, if you want to use more than $500 worth of memory in your server, you have to step up to Enterprise Edition. Seriously? Standard Edition licensing…