Enabling Growth Through Performance
Enabling Growth Through Performance

Nuances of the Microsoft Windows UAC

By Josh Patterson | April 16, 2019 | 0 Comments

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…

Install VPS in Workgroup Environment

By Josh Patterson | March 8, 2019 | 0 Comments

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…

What are these ephemeral drives on my VM?

By Josh Patterson | February 6, 2019 | 0 Comments

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…

How can I use ephemeral drives with SQL Server tempdb?

By Josh Patterson | January 19, 2019 | 0 Comments

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…

Creating an Extended Events Session

By Josh Patterson | December 12, 2018 | 0 Comments

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 capture query activity for a particular table. So, let’s run through how we might do this with extended…

Tracing Events in SQL Server

By Josh Patterson | November 16, 2018 | 0 Comments

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 robust. Tracing with SQL Profiler Tracing with SQL Server profile is the good ol’ way…

SQL Server Data Compression

By Josh Patterson | October 26, 2018 | 0 Comments

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 am going to give you an example of how we can use compression to decrease disk latency, maximize memory…