Production Database Administration

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.