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 waits and queues to the Windows System Monitor, which you might also know as PerfMon or ...

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 for 32-bit architectures, but I’ll blog about that at another time. First, let’s start ...

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 paying for each transmission that comes down the line. A very good point indeed. This got me to ...

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 Time'    The interesting part of get-Counter is that you can add a ...

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 were some questions about what this actually entails – so I thought I would post that description ...

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 with these tools, what should you track? Well, one of the items I track is time. I track the ...

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”, “Code Optimization” and “Index Analysis” as starting points, and most folks start there and ...

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 "\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec" -SampleInterval 1 -MaxSamples ...

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 little test to simulate that process, and now I can run that from anywhere. The trick is the ...

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 instrumentation, but for the time being, you’ll have to go with a different metric – round trip ...