When I start a SQL Server Critical Care with a client, the first thing I ask is, “What is your #1 pain point? Where does it hurt?” The answer I hear most often is, “The server is too slow”. I’m a runner. If I was able to run a 5K race at an 8:30 per…
For this month's T-SQL Tuesday topic, Michael J. Swart told us to argue against a popular opinion, and man, is that right up my alley. I've told you to stop worrying about index fragmentation, stop backing up your logs once an hour, and to stop running $14k of licensing on $3k of hardware. You're probably checking…
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. Pretend that you're a schoolteacher in a classroom with a couple dozen students. You've got a class project that you need to…
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.
