I received a question this morning about whether there are any ways to estimate the memory requirements of executing SSIS packages?  In the case of the question, the emailer wanted to know how to do things like find out the data size at the source and at the destination of a data transformation, or how to reckon the memory consumption of ...

Have you ever looked at the Windows Task Manager for a quick read on SQL Server 2005 memory consumption?   You can get good information from the Windows Task Manager about SQL Server memory, but you have to know what to look for. When running with AWE memory enabled on a 32-bit system, you may see an unusually low amount of ...

I'm very excited about the new Management Data Warehouse coming in SQL Server 2008 (which was called Performance Studio at one point), but keep in mind there are lots of available tools in the current versions. One of the students in my class last week put together this list of his favorites. Note that some of the tools can be used together. For ...

You might encounter a situation, under a very heavy workload, where processing for certain transactions starts out very efficiently, but over time becomes much less efficient.    A good place to start troubleshooting is, of course, PerfMon.  But PerfMon can fail to reveal the culprit, since the CPU can remain stable and moderate ...