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, ...

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. ...

Last week at SQL Bits #8 in Brighton, England, SQL Sentry (my employer) announced its partnership with DBSophic, makers of the Qure workload management suite. Qure Workload Optimizer is a tool aimed at analyzing a workload and providing suggestions to improve the overall performance of that workload. These suggestions can range from adding and ...

This is the third installment of a series on our deployment of System Center at my workplace, emphasis on SQL Server MP. At this point we’ve got Operations Manager installed, and up and running, and we’ve been able to categorize all the monitored servers into production, preproduction, test and DR using groups that have dynamic membership rules. ...

I was fortunate to be able to attend the Vancouver BC SQLSaturday this past weekend, and it was excellent! Great sessions, good facility, well attended. Nice work, and a huge thank you to the volunteers that made that happen. One side perk: I got a copy of this terrific performance counters poster from Quest, which you can download as a PDF ...

At my office we’re about 90 days into our implementation of System Center Operations Manager for Windows Server and SQL Server monitoring. All in all it’s been a good experience, and I’m really excited to have access to this tool. I’ve logged a fair number of years as a DBA on products like Idera’s SQL Diagnostic Manager and Quest Spotlight on SQL ...

The sys.dm_exec_query_stats view is one of my favorite DMVs. It has replaced a large chunk of what I used to use SQL Trace for--pulling metrics about what queries are running and how often--and it makes this kind of data collection painless and automatic. What's not to love? But use cases for the view are a topic for another post. Today I want to ...

 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? ...

Lately I'm faced with a fairly ambitious data center move, and at the same time with an initiative to consolidate sprawling SQL Servers onto centralized clusters. It's a chunk of work, but these two notions have fit together pretty well: as long as we're moving SQL services and touching everything, it seems to be easier to make the consolidation ...