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…
Tag: Performance
Automated Backup Tuning
Tuning your backups is a wonderful thing. You could easily reduce the time it takes to backup your databases by 50% of more just by changing a few settings, and yet so few people do it. I asked myself the question why and came up with two answers. People do not know how to tune…
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…
Why Your DBAs Need Access to VMware vCenter
Your DBAs need direct access to VMware vCenter. Shocking, eh? At a minimum, they need read-only access to the performance statistics for their virtual machines hosting their database server, as well as the host that they reside upon. I consider a requirement for all DBAs to have vCenter performance statistics access in environments where I…
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…
SQL Rally 2012 Recap and Session Files
SQL Rally 2012 was hosted by the North Texas SQL Server User Group. More tha anything, it was nice to be back in the area where I grew up. I was born in Houston, but I grew up in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. It really brought back a lot of great memories for me like…
SQL Server 2012 on VMware vSphere
Microsoft recently released SQL Server 2012 to the wild just a couple of weeks ago. Even though this release is in its infancy, organizations and their database administrators should immediately begin to explore and plan for the adoption of this release into their corporate technology roadmap. Multiple features in this release are individually tremendous, and…
Whitepaper: Demystify Tempdb Performance & Management
There are many misconceptions and myths about tempdb and purported best practices are inconsistent at best. It’s hard to know which advice to follow when one resource says to always do it one way and another tells you to always do it the opposite way. Many times, both resources are correct in certain situations or…