Every year at PASS, I do the same thing. I hmm and haw over which sessions I want to go to, and I end up making some tough choices at game time.  This year I believe I'll be pretty busy, so my typical pie-in-the-sky view of how much I'll be able to attend just isn't going to pan out.  Instead, I have selected 5 sessions that I really ...

What does it mean if you see a high percentage of signal waits? Thanks to Microsoft whitepapers, presentations, and blogs, everybody would say it implies CPU pressure.   Well, almost everyone except Mario Broodbakker, whose excellent blog “Taking the guesswork out of SQL Server performance profiling Part 2” shows us that SQL Server signal ...

Regardless of the DBMS make or model, the transaction throughput curve of a database system is often shaped like a trapezoid. As the load level goes up initially, so does the transaction throughput. As the load level continues to go up, the transaction throughput will reach a plateau. After the load level is cranked up still further, the ...

SQL Server waits enable you to identify where SQL Server is spending a lot of time doing nothing but waiting. This allows you to quickly zoom in and focus on the problem areas that are most relevant to the root cause, and will most likely help cut down time you may otherwise waste on, for instance, irrelevant perfmon counters or SQL trace events. ...