Let's talk about database application benchmarking.This is a skill set which, in my opinion, is one of the major differentiators between a journeyman-level DBA and a true master of the trade. In this article published in my monthly column at Database Trends & Applications magazine, I'll give you a brief introduction to TPC benchmarks and, ...

I'm doing two new webcasts next week on Wednesday, December 19th, one in the morning and the other after lunch.   SSDs are a Game Changer for SQL Server Storage No, session is not exclusively about SSDs.  But this is my first session on IO and storage tuning that emphasizes SSDs over hard disks.  As Bob Dylan said ''Times, they ...

Here's a quick tip for you:During some restore operations on Microsoft SQL Server, the transaction log redo step might be taking an unusually long time.  Depending somewhat on the version and edition of SQL Server you've installed, you may be able to increase performance by tinkering with the readahead performance for the redo operations. ...

The PerfMon Counters That Just Won't DieOne of the things that's simultaneously great and horrible about the Internet is that once something gets posted out in the ether, it basically never goes away.  (Some day, politicians will realize this.  We can easily fact check their consistency).  Because of longevity of content posted to ...

I had the honor of traveling the great state of Colorado last week, speaking at the PASS chapters in Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Denver.  At all three events, we had a stellar attendance and, at least in Denver, broke all the records in recent memory both in terms of overall attendance and in first-timers. ...

SQL Server comes with a wide array of tools for monitoring your environment. There are logs and traces that provide information when errors occur, but these are often used passively to react to events that have already occurred.  There's PerfMon, and Profiler, and loads of Dynamic Management Views to check.  But where to look? As ...

If you haven't started to read Shashank Pawar (blog), you're missing out. Shashank is part of Microsoft Australia and has been writing some very good content lately. Here's an example from the Reference Architecture for High Performance SQL Server:HP and Microsoft engineering teams have worked together to create a reference architecture to ...

When you're developing new Transact-SQL code or modifying some existing code, do you just launch directly into programming? I know that I did just that, for years. It wasn't until I was trying to performance tune some existing code that I realized I hadn't actually taken caching of data and execution plans into account. So all those modified ...

I will be the 1st to admit that I am no Itzik Ben-Gan when it comes to writing complex SQL statements and I wonder at times how people come up with some of the Selects that I see.  Sometimes they are so complex or convoluted that I simply have a hard time figuring out the intent or the logic behind them. But as a performance consultant I ...