January 2008 - Posts

• SQL Server Performance Baselines – What's Missing?

  A frequently asked question is what counters should be included in a SQL Server baseline. The discussion then quickly proceeds to define a set of perfmon counters to be logged as the performance baseline. And often, people seem to have an urge to try Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 30, 2008 11:26 AM by Linchi Shea | 4 Comments Filed under: Performance, Best Practices

• SQL Server “Always On” and Oracle HARD

  A while back, I was drafted to work on some database corruption issues, and spent a good amount of time toying with the notion of database resilience. In the process, I looked at various vendor initiatives in helping to alleviate data corruption, and Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 22, 2008 9:57 PM by Linchi Shea | 2 Comments Filed under: Storage

• SQL Server Checkpoint I/O Behavior

  Andrew Kelly in a recent post here advised visiting/revisiting the SQL Server I/O basics, and I completely agree. A firm grasp of the basics can make it easy to understand some system behaviors that otherwise may be puzzling at times. A question that Read More... Posted Saturday, January 19, 2008 3:11 AM by Linchi Shea | 5 Comments Filed under: Performance, Storage, SQL Server 2005

• Ad Hoc vs. Parameterized

  To many, this is an old and tired topic, and any more mention of ad hoc queries versus parameterized queries may just send someone off the deep end. But recently I was doing some Oracle benchmarks, and the benchmark tool reported ~1,200 transactions per Read More... Posted Friday, January 18, 2008 11:48 AM by Linchi Shea | 4 Comments Filed under: Performance, Best Practices

• Where does Time Go? A follow up

  In my previous post on this subject , I mentioned that I'd very much like to see the authors repeat the performance analysis of database servers on a more current processor. Well, they did. A group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, including Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 15, 2008 1:07 AM by Linchi Shea | 0 Comments Filed under: Performance

• Checking out the competition

  Among the database management systems, I’m most comfortable with SQL Server. But if I have to give myself a label, I would consider myself more a database engineer than a SQL Server engineer. That is because I’m immensely interested in different perspectives Read More... Posted Sunday, January 13, 2008 1:06 AM by Linchi Shea | 8 Comments

• Sysadmin and Performance

  I was reading this excellent post on " Diagnosing Plan Cache Related Performance Problems and Suggested Solutions ” by the Microsoft SQL programmability & API development team, and was struck by the following statements: “ If the numbers of collisions Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 08, 2008 12:05 AM by Linchi Shea | 6 Comments Filed under: Performance

• Flash Memory and Databases

  Right now, flash memory-based solid state drives are still more expensive than traditional disk drives in terms of the cost per gigabyte. But flash-based drives or some type of hybrid that combines both flash and traditional disk drives seem to be coming. Read More... Posted Friday, January 04, 2008 9:59 PM by Linchi Shea | 7 Comments Filed under: Architecture, Storage

• Where does Time Go?

  A significant part of my job is to evaluate how SQL Server (and sometimes other DBMSs) performs on various hardware platforms, in particular on the processors and its related chipsets as they are being released. So naturally, I’ve been paying attention Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 02, 2008 1:02 AM by Linchi Shea | 5 Comments Filed under: Performance, Architecture