Featured Article(s)
Troubleshooting SQL Server 2005 service pack 3 problems
In this article, you can find the description of SQL Server 2005 service pack 3 bugs and the information on how to resolve or work around these problems.
Webcast Today – Register Now!
Quick Dynamic Data Customizations
In this demo learn how to kick off a new project, setup the data model and make a few customizations to the out of the box Dynamic Data site structure. Presented by: Rachel Appel
> Register Now
> 9/16/2009 at 12:00pm Noon Pacific
Performance Monitoring – Exactly What I Meant!
I’ve had a series of emails from people talking about performance monitoring tools for SQL Server. These were in response to my note yesterday about how frustrating it can be finding the right tools, all together (not perfmon, profiler, task manager, dashboard, etc.) and able to tell you what’s up with SQL Server. My note was about how fragmented it seemed to be.
Low and behold, I think everyone is seeing this. I’ve had so many varied responses, it’s pretty clear that there is a wide variety of solutions out there.
I have heard about third-party tools, an open source tool, the built-in tools and even custom scripts that people are using. There’s clearly not a consensus about how to approach this – so I thought I’d ask more specific questions to understand better what you’re seeing.
Here are my questions – if you have a minute, I’d really love to hear your thoughts.
1. What do you use as your *primary* monitoring tool?
1a. Why?
1b. Did something happen, or were there specific features that helped you make your choice of tools? What were they, if so?
1c. Do you use a secondary tool for additional information?
2. How often do you use your choice of approach? (How often do you have to fire up the monitoring to investigate an issue?)
3. What are the most common types of issues you find yourself chasing? Locking? Blocking? Server capacity vs. current load? Something else?
4. Do you feel your current approach gives you sufficient information about your systems that you can determine the problem and solve it? If not, what’s missing?
Please email me your thoughts and feedback here.
Virtual Conference, Coming Direct to Your Desktop
October 21-23, we’ll be bringing 75 sessions direct to your desktop. 15 speakers, tips, best practices, how-to information and amazing quality video. Take a look at Brent Ozar’s thoughts about the Virtual Conference here, then get registered – we’ll see you there!
[Register Here]
Featured White Paper(s)
How to Achieve 40:1 Backup Compression with LiteSpeed® for SQL Server’s SmartDiff
SQL Server can do differential backups, which capture only the parts of the database that have changed since the last full ba… (read more)