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How useful are query_hash and query_plan_hash for troubleshooting?
After my last post, I was contacted by email about the usefulness of query_hash in actual troubleshooting scenarios since the query_hash value is based on the statement and not the database in a...
View ArticleNew Article on SQLPerformance.com comparing “Observer Overhead” of Trace vs...
I have been so busy this week that I didn’t get a chance to blog about this yesterday when it happened, but I had a new article published on SQLPerformance.com that compares the performance impact or...
View ArticleNew Article: Tracking Database File AutoGrowth with Event Notifications
My latest article on SQL Server Central was published live today. This article shows how to use Event Notifications to monitor and alert on database file auto growth events inside of SQL Server and is...
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Faking Hardware NUMA on a SMP Machine for Learning and Demos
I’ve blogged about NUMA a couple of times in the past and we cover it extensively in our Immersion Events, specifically when discussing SQLOS and memory and scheduling management. One of the...
View ArticleNew Article: Performance Problems with SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition...
My latest article on SQLPerformance.com was published yesterday and highlights the potential for performance problems while using the default configuration of SQL Server 2012 using the Enterprise...
View ArticleClustering SQL Server on Virtual Machines (Round 2)
Recently there was lengthy discussion on the #sqlhelp hash tag on Twitter about clustering SQL Server on VMs and whether or not that was a good idea or not. Two years ago I first blogged about this...
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CPU Ready Time in VMware and How to Interpret its Real Meaning
In the last month I have had to explain how to interpret CPU Ready Time information for SQL Server VMs running on VMware to a number of people. The first time was on Twitter, and the topic is really...
View ArticleMigrating Legacy LOB Data Types to Current Ones – A Big Gotcha!
Recently, Erin (Blog|Twitter) and I encountered a bug in SQL Server that can affect some scenarios in a very negative manner. When working with a database that was designed in SQL Server 2000 using...
View ArticlePerformance Tuning SQL Server on Windows Server 2012
Properly configuring Windows and SQL Server to get the best performance from your server hardware is an important task for database administrators. There is a lot of information available online with...
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Common Table Expressions (CTEs), Window Functions, and Views
Common Table Expressions (CTEs), window functions, and views are all common things in SQL Server development these days. When CTEs and window functions were introduced in SQL Server 2005, a lot of...
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Graphically Viewing Extended Events Deadlock Graphs
I’ve previously blogged about the changes to the xml_deadlock_report in Extended Events to support multi-victim deadlock analysis. One of the side effects of this change was that the XML document for...
View ArticleExecution Plan Sanitizer v2
Almost two years ago I blogged about Sanitizing Execution Plans using PowerShell. The original intent behind this idea was to be able to provide completely sanitized execution plans that could be...
View ArticleSQL Saturday #192 Content Uploaded
I know that it is somewhat late, but I uploaded my slide decks and demos from SQL Saturday #192 in Tampa, FL to the SQL Saturday website earlier today. For simplicity in finding the information, the...
View ArticleTracking SQL Server Database Usage
One of the challenges with inheriting an existing set of SQL Servers and databases when you start a new job can be determining which of the databases are actively being used or not, especially on...
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DBCC CHECKDB Execution Memory Grants – Not Quite What You Expect
I was recently working on a client system that has problems running DBCC CHECKDB normally due to the concurrent volume of data changes occurring against their 2TB OLTP database. The challenge with...
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Finding Key Lookups inside the Plan Cache
This is actually a blog post I thought I’d written more than two years ago, but this morning when I went looking for it after receiving a question by email I realized that I’ve never blogged about...
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Implicit Conversions that cause Index Scans
Implicit conversions seem to be a growing trend in the SQL Server performance tuning work that I’ve been engaged in recently, and I’ve blogged in the past about ways to identify when implicit...
View ArticleNew Article – How expensive are column-side Implicit Conversions?
Last week I blogged about Implicit Conversions that cause Index Scans, and showed two charts for where implicit conversions could result in an index scan operation instead of an index seek during query...
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Read-Only Access to Virtual Center for DBAs
Most environments using VMware for server virtualization are going to also have Virtual Center Server installed for administration and monitoring. As a DBA, I always had access to Virtual Center with...
View ArticleQuerying the VMware vCenter Database (VCDB) for Performance and Configuration...
In my previous post I showed how DBAs can be provided with read-only access to Virtual Center for monitoring VM performance in the data-center One thing that many administrators don’t realize or...
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