Nobody has ever said that FusionIO cards were slow (because they aren’t). Especially if you compare their performance to regular spinning media, or high performance SANs. After all, no SAN will allow you to measure storage write latency in microseconds. Anyone that has had their database reside on a FusionIO card has had nothing but…
Category: Performance Tuning
Improving Performance When Querying Multiple DMVs
A couple of days ago I posted a stored procedure (sp_GetAGInformation) which queried multiple DMVs to pull together a bunch of Availability Group information. If you took a look at the code you would see that it used a couple of CTEs (Common Table Expressions). CTEs are a great way to do recursive work, and…
Performance Counters: Why It Depends
When you’re working through some vague performance issues (e.g., “SQL Server seems slow today”), one of the common things to do is to collect some performance counters. If you are collecting performance counters for the first time on the server, you don’t have anything to compare them against. This usually leads to searching the web…
Grody to the VARCHAR(MAX)
This morning I was looking through a new vendor database to see exactly what I would be supporting and I stumbled upon a curious table. This table seemed quite normal to the naked eye until I glanced upon the data types. There were four, count them four fields set to VARCHAR(MAX) and two set to…
Network Packet Size: to Fiddle With or Not to Fiddle With
A network pipeline isn’t nearly as pleasant to look at as the oil pipeline (or anything) in Alaska, but it’s something that DBAs should be aware of. There is a server configuration in SQL Server that controls the size of packet in which SQL Server sends out data. This setting is called network packet size…
CPU Overcommitment and Its Impact on SQL Server Performance on VMware
In the early days of virtualization, the core focus of virtualization was primarily consolidation. You could achieve quite high consolidation ratios, with some even as great as 20 to 1. This consolidation worked great for applications like file and print servers, development workloads, or other very lightly used servers. The virtualized servers that hold these…
Shrink That Database…Seriously?
Yesterday afternoon my storage administrator came to me and asked me to look at his Enterprise Vault database and make sure that they were receiving the proper maintenance because he was running a routine over the weekend to remove some e-mails that had exceeded their retention period and it was painfully slow. He was only…
Green? If You Only Knew the Power of the Dark Side!
Default Server Power Plan Continuing my blog series from SQL Saturday #132, I wanted to review one piece of good advice I received from the pre-conference training on Friday prior to the event. The pre-con titled “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” was presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog). The default power setting for a new server…
Good Best Practice Advice from the Pensacola Pre-Con, Round Two
Yesterday, I wrote about some advice that I received at the pre-con titled “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” which was presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog) from SQL Saturday #132 in Pensacola, Florida. Here are some more gems: Instant File Initialization is critical for performance, read more from Kimberly L. Tripp (twitter|blog). If you…
Good Best Practice Advice from the Pensacola Pre-Con
For my first blog about SQL Saturday #132, I wanted to review some of the good advice I received from the pre-conference training on Friday prior to the event. The pre-con titled “Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices” was presented by Microsoft Certified Masters Robert Davis (twitter|blog) and Argenis Fernandez (twitter|blog). Some of these I knew, some…