I love Query Plans No seriously, I love digging into query plans. Even writing XQuery to dig into them in sp_BlitzCache. I was both honored and horrified to take over development of it from Jeremiah. It’s a beast, but it’s my kind of beast. At around 4500 lines of code, when you want to make…
When I first look at a server, I want to know how busy it is, where its bottlenecks are, what is SQL Server waiting on and many other things. Batch Requests/sec is one of the data points that is used to measure how busy a server is. WHAT IS BATCH REQUESTS/SEC? Batch Requests/sec is a performance counter…
I like science fiction Not enough to go to conventions, or memorize every line, but I have some opinions on things. Dune is probably my favorite series of stories in the genre. Yes, I think Paul would beat Luke in a fight. Sorry, Star Wars people. He’s just kind of a wimp. Throw grenade, digress One…
We’ve already covered how to log activity using sp_WhoIsActive, but I wanted to share how I’ve seen it done in the wild. The difference between the two methods is that this version logs everything to the same table and is for continuous activity logging (scheduled job), whereas the other version uses a new table each time…
Moving parts SQL Server keeps on growing. With every new edition, you get more features, feature enhancements, and uh, “feature enhancements”. As I’m writing this, SQL Server 2005 is less than a week away from support ending, and SQL Server 2016 is up to RC2. Brent’s retrospective post got me thinking a bit. We went…
Step 1: Make a list of 5 problems you’ve faced in the last couple of months that you needed alerting on. If you’ve got a help desk ticket system, look at the ticket types that occur most frequently and cause the most outage times. For me as a DBA, that might be: SQL Server service…
The strength of your car’s headlights, the speed of your reactions, and the power of your brakes determine how fast you can drive safely at night. Likewise, in SQL Server, we need to see down the road before disaster strikes, and react as quickly as possible.
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.
Database administrators need to know each SQL Server’s weakest link so we know where to focus their hardware budgets and time. On any given server, we need to know what the slowest component is, and where it’ll pay off to invest hours and dollars. This is performance tuning, and the first place to start is…
