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• Performance Monitor and Wait Events Presentation with Quest

  Quest Software is a great partner with Microsoft, and I’m honored to be able to present with Brent Ozar, Kevin Kline and Ari Weil at a day-long event that you can attend for free. We’re going to cover many aspects of performance tuning, from Read More... Posted Monday, July 19, 2010 7:41 AM by BuckWoody | 1 Comments Filed under: SQL Server, Performance Tuning, Conferences

• The Windows Page File and SQL Server

  What is the best “Page File” size for a Windows system running SQL Server? I see this question over and over – and I see people answering it incorrectly all the time. Note: I’m talking specifically about 64-bit architectures here. The information is different Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 29, 2010 7:48 AM by BuckWoody | 6 Comments Filed under: SQL Server, Performance Tuning, Memory

• Performance-Driven Development

  I was reading a blog yesterday about the evils of SELECT * . The author pointed out that it's almost always a bad idea to use SELECT * for a query, but in the case of SQL Azure (or any cloud database, for that matter) it's especially bad, since you're Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2010 7:36 AM by BuckWoody | 3 Comments Filed under: Development, Developer, SQL Server, Performance Tuning, SQL Azure

• PowerShell Version Two – Get Continuous Perf Counters

  In version 2.0 of PowerShell, you can now use a direct command-let (get-Counter) to get at the Performance Monitor counters. For instance, to show the current value of the Processor Percent Time, use this command:   Get-Counter '\Processor(*)\% Processor Read More... Posted Thursday, February 25, 2010 7:32 AM by BuckWoody | 0 Comments Filed under: Tips, SQL Server, Scripts, Performance Tuning, PowerShell

• The SQL Server Health Check

  My friend Brent Ozar, who is a top-notch SQL Server Professional, mentioned on his blog ( http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2007/04/sql-server-health-check/comment-page-1/#comment-17520 ) that he brought in Microsoft Support to do a “Health Check”. There Read More... Posted Thursday, February 11, 2010 7:16 AM by BuckWoody | 3 Comments Filed under: Microsoft, SQL Server, Performance Tuning, Management, Maintenance, Customer Contact

• Tracking SQL Server Time

  In the past few blog posts I’ve showed you how to use several methods to track things in SQL Server. You can use the “tags” to the right of this post here at this site to list things like PowerShell, Performance Tuning and so on. Now that you’re armed Read More... Posted Monday, January 25, 2010 7:10 AM by BuckWoody | 0 Comments Filed under: DBA, SQL Server, Administration, Performance Tuning, Maintenance Plans, Maintenance, Metadata, Standard Reports

• Performance Tuning Methodology Preferences

  I’m holding Performance Tuning Workshops this week for my clients in Washington and Idaho. During that workshop, I explain that there are several ways to examine the SQL Server component of an application. There’s “Hardware Component Pressure Measurement”, Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 20, 2010 5:22 AM by BuckWoody | 2 Comments Filed under: SQL Server, Performance Tuning

• Performance Counters? There’s a script for that.

  It’s not hard to get Performance Monitor counters in PowerShell 1.0, and it’s REALLY easy in 2.0. This is one I used yesterday to monitor network bytes in and out on 2.0 (keep all of the green lines in this post on the same line) : get-counter -Counter Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 05, 2010 7:02 AM by BuckWoody | 4 Comments Filed under: Developer, DBA, SQL Server, Performance Tuning, PowerShell

• Measure Statement Performance with PowerShell

  When you monitor for performance, you might start in the database server itself. But a true test really has more to do with the “round trip” of a data request from a client to a server and then the return of data back to the client. So I wired up this Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 30, 2009 7:31 AM by BuckWoody | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server, Performance Tuning, PowerShell

• Monitoring SQL Azure For Performance

  In SQL Server Azure, there are no Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) or Performance Monitor Objects and Counters that you can access, so you can’t run your standard performance monitoring that way. I suspect that as time goes on, SQL Azure will have some Read More... Posted Tuesday, December 22, 2009 7:33 AM by BuckWoody | 3 Comments Filed under: Development, Developer, SQL Server, Performance Tuning, SQL Azure

• After the Upgrade, it runs differently…

  I got a question yesterday in the mail that I thought I would just answer here in a broad context. While I can’t troubleshoot or do performance tuning from a distance, there are some interesting concepts and suggestions this e-mail brings up: “I have Read More... Posted Tuesday, December 01, 2009 9:06 AM by BuckWoody | 6 Comments Filed under: Development, Developer, DBA, SQL Server, SQL Server 2008, Testing, Performance Tuning, Latest Version, Documentation