When I saw the topic for T-SQL Tuesday this time I just had to get in. Maybe I’ve never mentioned it, but backups is one of my big things. Today I’d like to talk about two topics that get overlooked quite often, the “backups” to the backup, so to speak. First up: proper
Year: 2016
What Really Causes Performance Problems?
Every IT shop has its problems with performance: some localized, and some that span a server, or even multiple servers. Technologists tend to treat these problems as isolated incidents – solving one, then another, and then another. This happens especially when a problem is recurring but intermittent. When a slowdown
VMware vSphere 6.5 breaks your SQL Server vNUMA settings
VMware’s latest release of the vSphere virtualization suite, version 6.5, changes how they handle vNUMA presentation to a virtual machine, and there’s a high likelihood that it will break your virtualized SQL Server vNUMA configuration and lead to unexpected changes in behavior. It might even slow down your SQL Servers. Here’s what you need to…
Is it safe to grant Administer Bulk Operations?
First I guess we had best start with definitions right? The permission Administer Bulk Operations and the role bulkadmin are required (one or the other) to perform bulk imports. Nothing more, nothing less. There is a really nice comparison of the two here. So as with all permissions we only grant them if there is…
Too Many Indexes?
Indexes are great. They speed up our queries. In fact, without them relational database systems wouldn’t work. Different indexes work best for different queries. In a system with a lot of queries that means we could need a lot of indexes. Fortunately we can have up to 999 non-clustered indexes per table and one clustered…
The Right Way To Attend PASS Summit
TL;DR – there is no right, or wrong way to attend the Summit. Decide on the things that are important to you, and what you want to get out of the days while you are there, and focus on those. With the 2016 PASS Summit coming up in a few weeks there are lots of…
Load Testing Results Might Not Be What You Think
Bottlenecks in your testing tools, infrastructure, or methodology might just hurt your load test results, and the results can skew your metrics. For example… A few weeks ago we were running an iperf load test to see what improvements (if any) could be made to the configuration of a Windows Server networking stack. Setting up iperf…
RBAR vs Batch
Many years ago Jeff Moden (of SQL Server Central fame) came up with the concept of RBAR. Row-By-Agonizing-Row. At it’s most basic it means you are inserting one row at a time. A more broad interpretation says it’s any type of loop even the type caused by a recursive CTE. And the point? Loops are…
Re-Evaluating Best Practices
I was reading a blog post from my friend Randolph West (b/t) on Best Practices and a thought struck me. Starting with Randolph’s definition of a best practice (he got it from Wikipedia and it’s more than good enough) A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to…
VMware CPU Co-Stop and SQL Server Performance (continued)
A number of you sent me some excellent questions about this topic, and my favorite asked me for the query that you can use to get this information DIRECTLY from the VMware vCenter database. SO… here you go! Just plug in your VM name (which might differ from your FQDN name). Feel free to modify…