I absolutely love talking about SQL Server backup and restores. It is one of my favorite sessions to give at user groups and conferences all over the world. I’ve also written a couple of books on the topic. Over the many years of working with Microsoft SQL Server, I tend to see the same mistakes […]
Category: SQL Tuning
Query Store for Azure PostgreSQL
Query Store is not just for Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Database anymore. Microsoft announced back in Oct 2018 that Query Store was available in Public Preview for PostgreSQL. How cool is that! As Microsoft continues to expand the Azure Data Platform with including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others, features that we know and love […]
New vCore Compute Levels for Azure SQL Database and Elastic Pools
Additional vCore-based elastic pools and single databases have been expanded for the general purpose, business critical, and hyperscale service tiers. This provides customers with more flexibility and options when migrating DTU-based deployments and right-sizing workloads for the cloud. Azure SQL Database, Elastic Pools, and Hyperscale have two processor types to select from. Gen 4 offers […]
Get OS Counter Memory Available Mbytes Using TSQL
I have been working recently in making sure that max memory is configured for the hundred plus database servers I support. In reading numerous books, blog post and attending various talks on memory management people reference the OS memory counter “Available Mbytes” a lot. Various references state that this value should be between 150 and […]
What is Page Life Expectancy (PLE) in SQL Server
Being a production DBA means having to quickly look at a SQL Server and diagnose issue with it. We know that a quick look at perfmon or task manager can tell us of high CPU usage, but what is a good way to quickly look at proper memory usage. Checking out the Page Life Expectancy […]
Performance Impact from Page Splits
Recently I was brought in to help troubleshoot performance issues on a database server. Going through my typical check list I noticed memory pressure on the box and made the recommendationof more memory which was simple to fix. What caught my attention though was that blocking was occurring on a transaction that was trying to […]
When Things That Are Supposed to Protect You Try to Kill You
This past week I was presented with a very unique issue. A call came in with a production issue on a tier one application. Unfortunately it was on a system that utilizes SQL 2000 SP4. Having a rather small toolset to use for support I had to rely on Perfmon, sysprocesses and the usual old […]
IOPS versus Throughput – Measuring Performance of Your Storage
Working on a recent consulting job, I was asked to explain the difference in throughput, which is, measured in MB/s versus IOPS as I had recommended a storage array that would provide many more IOPS and throughput than what is currently in use. For this client I had presented the expected IOPS per type of […]