The one and only important factor in monitoring is data. How much of x and how little of y? If you don’t know these values then you’re shooting in the dark. Microsoft has done a great job adding critical data points over the years; but, what happens when the data you need doesn’t exist?
Category: Performance
DBA 101: Tuning lookups
Sometimes it helps to go back to the basics and indexing is always a great topic. SQL Server has a wide variety of indexes; but, today we’re going classic and talking about Non-clustered indexes.
Query tuning 101: What’s a probe residual?
Query tuning is an important process that will probably never go away and sharpening your tuning skills is always a good idea.
I’ve spoken on this topic many times and talked about probe residuals before. Mostly at SQL Saturday events and for some online webinars.
DBA 101: Comparing two SQL plans
Simple post today: How to compare two plans in SSMS.
This task is a task that is often done by a DBA or developer who is wanting to compare changes of an index or perhaps even comparing queries between DEV and PROD.
T-SQL Tuesday: Finding issues with your query plan
This is my first time blogging with a T-SQL Tuesday topic. If you follow my blog you’ve probably noticed that one of the topics I enjoy the most is performance and query tuning.
While at Microsoft, I learned a lot from a lot of great people, such as Joe Sack, David Pless, and Tunji O. I try to pay forward the knowledge that these great people have bestowed on me.
DBA 101: Unique Constraint vs Unique Index
Designing a rock solid application and database can be difficult. New features and overlapping features mean that you’re able to accomplish a single task in many ways. For instance the numeric and decimal data types. Which should you use?Read More »
DBA 101: What you may be missing with “Missing indexes”
If you’ve read my blog, I’m sure by now you know that I have no love for GUI tools. I will say they are improving every day and maybe, just maybe, we will see the day when you can click happily away and do everything you want. Sadly, this is not the day.
A while back, SSMS added the “Missing Index” data to the graphical query plan. They even made it really easy to add.
Query tuning 101: Non-trusted Foreign Keys
Foreign keys are an interesting feature of relational databases. They help enforce data integrity, sometimes help improve performance by eliminating joins, and sometimes slow down DML operations (inserts, updates, and deletes).
Using Memory Optimized tables for reporting
I recently worked on a project for fraud. This project needed to relate 67 million accounts to one another “Kevin Bacon” style. This means that each unique account may tie to another account on ssn, email, home phone, business phone, or any other PII type metric.
What keeps clearing my query stats?
I was building out a blog post about cardinality today and noticed that sys.dm_exec_query_stats was getting cleared my my Surface Pro 3 dev instance about every 30 to 60 seconds.
I opened object explorer to check if any jobs were running in SQL Agent that may be running DBCC FREEPROCCACHE
