Posts by Tara Kizer

Tara Kizer

30 posts

When I’m not working on databases, I am spending time with my husband Michael and two kids Andrew and Madelyn in San Diego. If I’m not with family, I’m hiking somewhere in Southern California. Sometimes if I’m lucky, the family comes hiking with me. I also like to camp and run. I love the outdoors.

Does low fill factor affect SELECT performance?

Last Updated December 12, 2018

Tara Kizer

SQL Server

Sometimes good intentions lead to big problems. Imagine a system where page splits were thought to be causing a big enough performance problem that it made sense to change the fill factor setting of a lot of indexes. Now imagine you thought the fill factor setting was for how much free space you wanted when…

Unused Indexes – Are they really unused or have they just not been used YET?

Last Updated September 28, 2018

Tara Kizer

Indexing

During our Critical Care® sessions with clients, we often see unused indexes (reads=0) with high writes. Sometimes these unused indexes have very high writes. If an index is never being used to help with performance but SQL Server is having to maintain it for INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE operations, then why keep the index around?…

Does your backup strategy achieve RPO and RTO goals of the business?

Last Updated July 20, 2018

Tara Kizer

Backup and Recovery

When deciding on a backup strategy for a database, there are various things we must consider: Does this database need point-in-time recovery? What are the RPO (data loss) and RTO (downtime) goals? No one likes losing data or encountering unplanned downtime, but the business must decide on these goals so that we can setup an…

How to Reduce the CPU Overhead of Dynamic SQL

Last Updated May 23, 2018

Tara Kizer

Development, T-SQL

Dynamic SQL is a good choice for catch-all type queries, but you have to be careful how you execute the dynamic string. For frequently executed queries, “EXEC sp_executesql @sql”is a good choice but at the risk of encountering parameter sniffing issues. For queries that aren’t executed very often, “EXEC (@sql)” can be used, but you…

Concurrency Week: How Entity Framework and NHibernate Can Cause Poison RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE Waits

Last Updated January 8, 2019

Tara Kizer

Development, Memory Grants

I’ve already blogged about my dislike for ORMs from a production DBA performance tuning standpoint only. I get that they’re useful to developers. I get it. But I’m focused on performance. A quick recap of what I don’t like about ORMs from that other blog post: Implicit conversions due to nvarchar variables vs varchar columns…

Azure SQL DB Managed Instances: Transactional Replication

Last Updated March 20, 2018

Tara Kizer

Managed Instances, Replication

I knew Brent and Erik wouldn’t touch replication, so I figured I’d give it a whirl. My good, old friend replication I have a love-hate relationship with replication. Mostly hate due to latency and errors, but it does serve its purpose. Before Availability Groups came out, I used Transactional Replication to copy data from the…

Troubleshooting Parameter Sniffing Issues the Right Way: Part 3

Last Updated May 26, 2020

Tara Kizer

Parameter Sniffing, SQL Server

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I showed you the various ways to get the application’s SET options so that you can get the same execution plan as the application. If you skip that step and run the query that is timing out in the application, it could be fast in SSMS. Your…

Troubleshooting Parameter Sniffing Issues the Right Way: Part 2

Last Updated May 26, 2020

Tara Kizer

Execution Plans, Parameter Sniffing

In part 1 of this series, I showed you how to get the compiled parameter values for an execution plan that you are investigating. You’ve identified it as a bad execution plan. You’ve already fixed the production emergency by removing the bad plan from the plan cache. You’re almost ready to start testing for a…

Troubleshooting Parameter Sniffing Issues the Right Way: Part 1

Last Updated May 26, 2020

Tara Kizer

Execution Plans, Parameter Sniffing

Many of you are troubleshooting Parameter Sniffing issues the wrong way in production. In this three-part series, I’ll show you how to troubleshoot it the right way: Getting the Compiled Parameter Values Getting the App’s SET Options Avoiding the Density Vector This is part 1 in the series. Parameter Sniffing 101 When a query suddenly…

How to Suck at Database Administration

Last Updated February 14, 2018

Tara Kizer

Production Database Administration

157

This isn’t about having a sucky job, this is about you sucking at your job. There’s a big difference. You could be sucking at your job because you hate your job and just don’t care. I get that. In that case though, you know better but choose not to do better. I’ve encountered some people…

Network Issue or THREADPOOL waits?

Last Updated December 23, 2017

Tara Kizer

Wait Stats

I’ve had a handful of clients that were experiencing significant THREADPOOL waits. This isn’t a wait type that I had any knowledge of prior to joining Brent Ozar Unlimited. Looking back, I am pretty sure that a few servers that I’ve been responsible for over the years were experiencing it based on the symptoms. WebOps:…

Maintenance Plans Enable Your Disabled Indexes

Last Updated December 16, 2017

Tara Kizer

SQL Server

One of Brent’s students in the Performance Tuning class, Jason M., told Brent that maintenance plans enable your disabled indexes. What the what? Steps to reproduce: Disable an index Setup a maintenance plan to rebuild all indexes Run the job Check if the index is disabled or enabled. Steps 1 and 2 can be reversed…

Index Maintenance Madness

Last Updated December 1, 2017

Tara Kizer

SQL Server

When we look at a new server, we check out their database maintenance jobs, making sure their server is in a safe place before we dig into their pain points. We verify if their backups and DBCC CHECKDB jobs can meet their RPO/RTO goals. We also check out their index maintenance jobs, if any. When…

So You Want a Cheap Disaster Plan

Last Updated November 22, 2017

Tara Kizer

Cloud Computing, Log Shipping

There’s a lot that goes into a Disaster Recovery plan. One of them is offsite backups. There are some businesses that don’t have backups going offsite, let alone a Disaster Recovery plan. This conversation has taken place more than I thought it would. Me: Do you have any HA or DR features in place? Them:…

Getting Help with a Slow Server

Last Updated March 8, 2018

Tara Kizer

First Responder Kit, Processes and Practices

StackExchange users often ask, “Why is my server slow?” Here’s a few tips to get better, faster answers. Server information You may have already included server information in your question, but it may not be sufficient. Run sp_Blitz to output a lot of server information fast. Transact-SQL EXEC sp_Blitz @OutputType = ‘markdown’, @CheckServerInfo = 1 1…

What is the biggest mistake you made in production?

Last Updated August 1, 2017

Tara Kizer

SQL Server

This has been blogged before by several people. One thing I’ve learned from Brent is to not let the fact that the topic has been blogged before stop you from blogging about it. With that out of the way… When you have sysadmin access, you are bound to make a big mistake in production at…

What Do You Think About ORMs?

Last Updated July 12, 2017

Tara Kizer

Development

I was recently asked what I thought about ORMs (Entity Framework, NHibernate, Dapper, etc) while we were looking at implicit conversion warnings in execution plans. Before I answered the question, I let them know that my answer is based on being a production DBA and the numerous performance problems I have had to troubleshoot that…

Builder Day: Doing a Point-in-Time Restore in Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Last Updated June 13, 2017

Tara Kizer

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Backup and Recovery

Brent had an idea that we should set aside a day per month where we could build things in the cloud and blog about our experiences. I was tasked with Amazon RDS for SQL Server: create an instance, configure backups and test point-in-time restores. After grabbing some coffee, I logged into the AWS console. We…

New White Paper: How to Build a SQL Server Disaster Recovery Plan with Google Compute Engine

Last Updated March 17, 2017

Tara Kizer

Google Compute Engine, High Availability, Log Shipping, Processes and Practices

You’re a systems administrator or database administrator who wants to protect your production SQL Server. However, you don’t have a separate data center or another colo site. Learn about what we call Log Shipping 2.0 You’re looking for instructions on: How to copy your SQL Server databases to Google Cloud Storage How to spin up…

sp_DatabaseRestore: Open Source Database Restore Stored Procedure

Last Updated April 15, 2023

Tara Kizer

Backup and Recovery, First Responder Kit

You use Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts to do your database backups on SQL Server 2016 or newer, and you want to do things like: Restore the most recent database backup Test it for corruption Initialize restores to get ready for log shipping or replication That’s where the open source sp_DatabaseRestore comes in, from our free…

Posts by Tara Kizer

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