Notes from the field on SQL Server, Windows, performance tuning and the software we build.
Rolling your own agentic harness is not for the faint of heart.
SQL Server's memory-optimized tables, introduced in SQL Server 2014, are designed to significantly improve performance by leveraging in-memory technology. These tables store data directly in memory, enabling faster...
Indexing is an essential component of database performance tuning in SQL Server. It enables the efficient retrieval of data by creating a data structure that maps the values in a specific column or set of columns to…
SQL Server is a powerful and flexible relational database management system (RDBMS) designed to manage and store data efficiently. One of its key features is the ability to manage concurrent access to data through its…
Deadlocks are a common problem in all relational database systems that can lead to poor performance and even data loss (in some special cases). A deadlock occurs when two or more transactions are waiting for each other…
As businesses continue to amass large quantities of data, efficient data management becomes increasingly important. One critical aspect of data management is data compression, which can help reduce storage costs…
Today’s question is: How can I quickly find the longest running query and determine why it’s taking so long? In this video we'll discover one of the ways we can use the Vroom Performance Suite to quickly locate a long…
Update 2023:Check out our new documentation site for all of our various tools.
Simply put, VPS is a performance monitoring, tuning and alerting tool for Windows, SQL Server, VMWare and IIS. VPS was conceptualized and built out of necessity as tools that exist in this ecosystem lack various…
Today I want to talk about one of my favorite tricks that's not talked about much: mapping a network drive under the SQL Server account.
xpcmdshell is one of those somewhat hidden gems/power-tools in SQL Server that can both make life easy and very insecure all at the same time.
There are a lot of "most overlooked" configuration settings in SQL Server, but I’m going to cover these two alone since they are quite closely related: Cost Threshold for Parallelism and Max Degree of Parallelism.
Nuances of the Microsoft Windows UAC/LUA and its effects on performance monitoring.
Installing VPS on any server is a pretty straight forward process - and installing on a workgroup is no different. Active Directory domains are recommended for larger environments because they benefit from the…
Ephemeral drives are a bit of a hot topic when it comes to computing in the cloud. Many larger companies which maintain their own VM infrastructure have even come around to the wonders of ephemeral storage – VMWare for…
First of all, if you are not familiar with ephemeral storage, then check out our previous post on the topic. SQL Server loves to use tempdb and believe it or not it’s not relegated solely to the types of queries you…
Creating an extended events session is pretty straight forward with SQL Server 2012 as Microsoft has finally introduced a graphical user interface. During my time as a DBA, I often needed to create a quick trace to…
When you want to trace or instrument SQL Server activity, whether it be for performance purposes, security, auditing, etc. – you really have two baked in methods. Well, there are a few others – but they are not all that…
When people talk about data compression they are typically discussing archival – but Microsoft has used this very popular technology in a way that has managed to fall into the category of performance improvement. Here I…
