How cluster key size can lead to GBs of wasted space
Back in November I kicked off a survey that had you run some code to get some details about your cluster keys, nonclustered indexes, and
Back in November I kicked off a survey that had you run some code to get some details about your cluster keys, nonclustered indexes, and
Continuing with my "index health" series, I've got another piece of code for you to run. This time I'm interested in the number of columns
Yesterday I blogged about how having too few or too many nonclustered indexes can be a big problem for performance (see here). Today I’m posting
Back at the start of August I kicked off a survey (see here) that gave you some code to run to produce an aggregate list of
(New for 2020: we’ve published a range of SQL Server interview candidate screening assessments with our partner Kandio, so you can avoid hiring an ‘expert’ who
This is a performance tuning post that's been on my to-do list for quite a while. Wait stats analysis is a great way of looking
Over the last few months I’ve been blogging occasionally about some pretty deep performance tuning topics, namely latches and spinlocks (see my blog categories Wait
A month ago I kicked off a survey about MAXDOP setting – see here for the survey. I received results for 700 servers around the
(Check out my Pluralsight online training course: SQL Server: Index Fragmentation Internals, Analysis, and Solutions.) Back in April I kicked off a survey where I asked
I have a few surveys to editorialize but I'd like to kick off another one where you have to run a bit of code and
It’s been a long time since the last blog post on SSD benchmarking – I’ve been busy! I’m starting up my benchmarking activities again and hope
Continuing my series on advanced performance troubleshooting – see these two posts for the scripts I’ll be using and an introduction to the series: Wait
In this survey I'd like you to run some code and then send me the results (and I'm sure someone will put together a PowerShell
(Check out my Pluralsight online training course: SQL Server: Performance Troubleshooting Using Wait Statistics and my comprehensive library of all wait types and latch classes.) It’s all
I just had to figure out how to do this so I figured a quick blog post is in order to save other people time
(New for 2020: we’ve published a range of SQL Server interview candidate screening assessments with our partner Kandio, so you can avoid hiring an ‘expert’ who
A couple of week ago I kicked off a survey about common causes of performance problems – see here for the survey. Firstly I asked
In this week's survey I've got four mini-surveys for you, all to do with in-depth performance analysis. I'd like to know whether you've ever used
This survey follows on from the survey results I just blogged about, and is particularly apt given we're here in Dallas this week teaching our
About a month ago I kicked off a survey asking what you look for when first analyzing a plan for a poorly performing query. You
I just about beat my fists against my laptop this afternoon while updating a couple of demo scripts for our Performance class in Dallas this
In this week's survey, I want to know how you've got tempdb configured compared to the number of processor cores SQL Server thinks it has.
Last week I kicked off a survey about network latencies and database mirroring. See here for the original post. Here are the results of the
In my survey for this week I'm interested in what you look for first when analyzing a query plan. I'll report on the results around
The January edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column. This month's
I’ve been doing a lot of performance tuning work over the last couple of months and this weekend found something that’s very pervasive out in
At the end of December I showed you how to discover if power saving is enabled on your server, which can lead to variable and
(Yes, I know I haven’t editorialized the last survey on What’s in a Job Title – I will in the New Year.) Over the last
(New for 2020: we’ve published a range of SQL Server interview candidate screening assessments with our partner Kandio, so you can avoid hiring an ‘expert’ who
I’ve recently been creating some content about wait stats analysis and I think it would be really interesting to see what kind of waits people
Last time I posted about SSDs I presented the findings from sequential inserts with a variety of configurations and basically concluded that SSDs do not provide
Back at the start of July I kicked off a survey around your plans for SSDs (see here) and now I present the results to
Over the last month we've been teaching in Europe and I haven't had much time to focus on benchmarking, but I've finally finished the first
Many times I'm asked whether having multiple data files can lead to an improvement in performance. The answer, as with all things SQL (except concerning
In the previous post in the series I introduced SSDs to the mix and examined the relative performance of storing a transaction log on an
Well it's been almost 6 weeks since my last benchmarking blog post as I got side-tracked with the Myth-a-Day series and doing real work for clients :-)
I’m starting a new blog category to talk about some of weird and confusing stuff I see while query tuning. First up is the case
Here's yet another reason to be very careful when using the missing index DMVs… There's a bug in the missing index DMVs that could end
(Look in the Misconceptions blog category for the rest of the month’s posts and check out the 60-page PDF with all the myths and misconceptions
(Look in the Misconceptions blog category for the rest of the month’s posts and check out the 60-page PDF with all the myths and misconceptions
Over the last few months there's been some noise (mostly of my making) on Twitter about the number of VLFs in transsction logs. Given the
(Look in the Misconceptions blog category for the rest of the month’s posts and check out the 60-page PDF with all the myths and misconceptions
(Look in the Misconceptions blog category for the rest of the month’s posts and check out the 60-page PDF with all the myths and misconceptions
Blog posts in this series: For the hardware setup I'm using, see this post. For an explanation of log growth and its effect on perf, see this
Way back in the mists of time, at the end of the last century, I wrote DBCC SHOWCONTIG for SQL Server 2000, to complement my
Blog posts in this series: For the hardware setup I'm using, see this post. For an explanation of log growth and its effect on perf, see this
(Check out our Pluralsight online training course: SQL Server: Improving Storage Subsystem Performance.) A while ago I blogged about disk partition alignment, and how the default
Blog posts in this series: For the hardware setup I'm using, see this post. For the baseline performance measurements for this benchmark, see this post. For the
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