Enabling Growth Through Performance
Enabling Growth Through Performance

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SQL Script Generation

SQL Script Generator

How many times have you needed to script out a table from a SQL Server database? What about all of the indexes? Or maybe it was just the procedures in a particular schema? Or export all of your data as insert/update statements? Boy have we got the tool for you! Be sure to stick it…

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What is VPS?

VPS is the Vroom Performance Suite 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 features that simply the daily life of Database Administrators, Systems Engineers and Developers. We…

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Mapping a Drive with XP_CMDSHELL

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. You see, mapped drives are “per user” – so if you map one on the SQL server, then SQL server can’t see it. Likewise, if you map one for SQL…

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Enable and Disable xp_cmdshell

xp_cmdshell 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. You see, this function allows any SQL Server administrator to run any command/program/shell-script/batch-file that the SQL Server account has access to. It seems counter-intuitive at first but I’ve seen this…

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Cost Threshold for Parallelism and MAXDOP

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. What’s all this about? First let’s discuss Degree of Parallelism in its most simple form. When given a task to…

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Nuances of the Microsoft Windows UAC

Nuances of the Microsoft Windows UAC/LUA and its effects on performance monitoring. The UAC (User Account Controls) and LUA (Limited User Account) have an effect on the way that privileged tools such as VPS implement account impersonation. Lets demystify what can sometimes seems like a daunting problem of access control and escalation. The confusion starts…

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Install VPS in Workgroup Environment

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 centralized security management – but many website setups or corporate ERP packages rely on dedicated walled off sets of systems that may…

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What are these ephemeral drives on my VM?

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 instance even has a dedicated local ephemeral swap feature. We’ll start at the top by first…

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How can I use ephemeral drives with SQL Server tempdb?

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 might think, such as ordering and grouping. It’s used by a whole world of…

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