Missing indexes are an important part of the indexing strategy. I usually start with sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats to find both inefficient and unused indexes and then supplement with missing indexes.
The missing index DMVs are great but they’ve always been missing something.
It’s Friday and I’m ready for the weekend as I’m sure everyone else is. This weekend I’m looking forward to getting yard work done and browsing through the whoisactive SQL Ops Studio extension code.
If you’re in Chicago on March 17 and have some free time, why not check out all the cool kids?
One of the things I enjoy most is diagnosing storage latency. I honestly couldn’t tell you why I enjoy it so much; but, I just do. When it comes to storage in Windows one of the best things you can do is capture an ETL trace for the STORPORT driver.
I’ve never been a fan of a GUI for DBA work. Give me a hand crafted script or a list of DMVs and I’m a happy camper.
Perfmon is probably my best friend. It’s always there and happy to tell me the truth. It seldom falters and has helped me get to root cause on even the toughest of performance issue. But what about PaaS?
Databases are platforms that are designed to securely store and retrieve your data. Perhaps that’s why they’re called a data “base”? So if your data is in a base, you’d want to lay it out in some logic way.
In case you missed the first post on this topic, you can read it here: SQL Server: SARGability. This post continues the series and today we’re going to discuss the dangers of functions.
SARG is short for Search Argument. This is an important tuning term and something every developer and DBA should know. I plan to do a few blogs on this topic and today marks the first.
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?
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.
