Customizable PerfMon Counter for SQL Server

As the summer vacation season is pretty much over, it’s time for me to get back to working and blogging again. I had originally planned to write up a few posts during the summer, but as I spend most of my days writing my bachelor’s thesis, I simply didn’t have the energy to do so. And I did also want to enjoy the Finnish summer with the family as the sunny season here isn’t exactly a long one. And what’s a better way to get started than about blogging about SQL Server and Performance Monitor!

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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 and is great at giving you a good idea on what has been going on in your servers during the last several days.

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SQL Server tool improvements

While there’s plenty of new and exciting features coming with SQL Server 2016, Microsoft has also worked hard on improving the delivery of their SQL Server tools. Previously figuring out the correct tools or what version to install could be more than little confusing, but no more!

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Managing shared folders in Windows Failover Cluster with Powershell

I’ve been using Powershell more and more lately, most of the time the motivation has been to do repeatable tasks much more quickly and efficiently but there has also been other cases where Powershell has been the only way to accomplish something. Most often this is due to lacking GUI or Windows issues that have prevented me from using the GUI in the first place. This post describes the latter scenario and the Powershell workaround.

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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 these changes, or if they’re going to break your application.

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Few thoughts from the Data Driven SQL event

Just finished watching the Data Driven event that was broadcasted live from New York earlier today. As expected there was a lot of information about SQL Server 2016 and quite a few visitors telling how their companies used Microsoft SQL Server in their daily business. And these were some big businesses, having impressive amounts of data and transactions to handle. With SQL Server 2016 Microsoft is giving us a feature packed and complete data platform to work with.

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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 at the SAN weren’t helping. After a while we figured out that the issue was not in the test software or at the SAN but in the scheduled tasks we used to run the different test!

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