Category: Performance troubleshooting
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The need for (storage) speed and the Cloud
In a past couple months I’ve seen this happen in a couple of different customers, so I thought I’d write a short post about the topic. While it’s easy to think that running SQL Server workloads on cloud VM’s is the same as running them on VM’s in an on-premises…
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My favorite PerfMon counters
About two months back I ended up moving to another job, which has unfortunately kept me to be bit too occupied to find the time to blog, until now. Due to this previously mentioned career change, I have been working quite a bit with monitoring, and it gave me a…
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Creating a Performance Monitor Black Box
One thing that we always set up on a new server is a Performance Monitor “black box”. The black box is basically a PerfMon collector that starts when the server does and runs continuously on the background, gathering performance data from number of vital counters. It has minimal performance overhead…
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Distributed Replay
Distributed Replay is a feature that was first introduced with SQL Server 2012. It allows you to play a set of recorded transactions against a SQL Server database. This can be extremely useful if you’re doing hardware or SQL Server version upgrades and want to test the performance impacts of…
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Poor results in I/O tests due to Windows Task Scheduler settings
Not a long ago I was doing a database cluster delivery to one of our customers and as a part of that process, I scheduled our regular set of test runs for the storage. The results of the tests we ran were bad and none of the changes we did…
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Review: sp_WhoIsActive
This is definitely one of the most used tools in my toolkit. Besides being incredibly useful when you need to figure out issues like blocking and locking and what the transactions are doing, you should take a few long moments to look at the code. The code extensively commented making…
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Tools of the Trade.
Most DBAs have their own favorite set of tools and utilities they like to use and so do I. In this blog series, I’ll be introducing you to my favorite tools of the trade. Most of these utilities are made by the members of SQL Server community and all of…
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PerfMon tips, tricks and a single annoying quirk
Figuring out possible causes for performance issues is one of the core skills for any DBA. There’s a whole bunch of tools for it, but this time I’ll be writing about one of my favorites. The Performance Monitor (PerfMon), which is included in every version and edition of Windows Servers…