When you write Powershell scripts and need to write a text file, you have a number of ways to accomplish that. The often suggested approach is to use cmdlets Add-Content or Out-File. Well, this is not news.   But some may not notice that these cmdlets are not there for performance. Sure, they are convenient. But if you need to write to a ...

The attached is the C# code that I used for generating the test results charted in my previous post.   Note that for testing no generated script is actually persisted into a file by this program. The Script() method is applied, but the resulting script strings are thrown away. For example, here is how a stored procedure is ...

Generating scripts through SMO can be as simple as walking down the database object tree and applying the Script() method to each scriptable object. Well, that is until you start to try it on a database that has a large number of objects (say a few thousands), and the long wait the becomes rather frustrating. I’m not talking about such ...

 UPDATE, April 28 2011: Who is Active v9.57 is outdated. Please use v11.00 instead.     Happy December, SQLblog readers! My gift to you, just in time for the holidays: The newest ''official'' release of your favorite SQL Server activity monitoring stored procedure.   Click here to download Who is Active? ...

This is a quick update on the T-SQL exercise I posted a few days ago. The goal was to write a simple T-SQL script to generate and load 4,000,000 rows into a table so that the following query would produce the worst performance, i.e. take longest time to finish:   DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS go SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.test;   The ...

Here is a T-SQL scripting exercise in case you have a few minutes to spare or are bored with whatever else you are doing.    Objective The task is to write a simple T-SQL script to generate and load 4,000,000 rows into a test table. The objective is to make the following simple test query to have the worst performance in terms of ...

Last year on December 31 I posted part of a larger monitoring script that I had been working on for a few months. I received lots of great feedback on the little script in both the comments and from people I was working with, and over the course of the last year I estimate that I have invested at least a couple of hundred hours in the script. The ...

There were discussions on disk misalignment on this site. See my previous post on “Performance Impact of Disk Misalignment”, and Kevin Kline’s blog on “How to Improve Application and Database Performance up to 40% in One Easy Step”   But thanks to Jimmy May's PASS 2008 presentation on the I/O performance impact of disk partition ...