Yesterday I talked about installing the Best Practices Analyzer 2005 (BPA) for a client that I was working with. After some initial installation issues, I was ready to check out their SQL Server environment. While the tool was running, I started checking out the SQL Server event logs to see if there was anything interesting … Continue reading Are You Down With The BPA?
Month: May 2009
BPA Installs But Doesn’t Work
I was hoping to have a case of the Mondays the other day. Whenever one hopes for “the Mondays”, Monday will always deliver. I was using a new PC at a client and installing some tools for an assessment that I was working on. After some download and installing, Best Practices Analyzer 2005 was installed … Continue reading BPA Installs But Doesn’t Work
SQL Load Generator
This project has been on CodePlex for a while, but I thought I would give it a plug. It’s a really good way to generate a load against a SQL Server without a lot of effort. I've used it quite a number of times with presentations and use it when testing different code choices to … Continue reading SQL Load Generator
Learning More About Parallelism
It’s quite often at clients that I spend time working on issues revolving around parallelism. In fact, just this week it’s been the single most irritating performance problem that I've had to deal with. If you aren’t up to snuff on parallelism there are a couple places I would start with getting up to speed: … Continue reading Learning More About Parallelism
I Didn’t Receive My Subscription
Ever have a Reporting Services (SSRS) subscription that didn’t fire off as you thought it should? Or was SQL Agent offline when subscriptions should have been fired? Or did you just create a subscription and want to find out if it’s been configured properly? Fortunately all of the information is sitting neatly and plainly in … Continue reading I Didn’t Receive My Subscription
Finding Objects In Schema
A while back I was asked to identify schemas that didn’t have any objects. Since it was a useful query, I thought I’d share it.
Querying for Parallelism
While working on some parallelism issues today I started using the query that detects whether there are queries currently running utilizing parallelism. It’s the same query that can be found in the white paper Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2005. Which I’ve included below: The information that I like to have on hand is … Continue reading Querying for Parallelism
Snapshots of Index Contention
Occasionally, I need to determine where index hotspots are located within databases. To do this, I use the DMV sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats. I’ve talked about this DMV before while I was going through the index analysis blogs posts. This DMV returns locking and blocking information for tables and indexes in the database. This information is aggregated since … Continue reading Snapshots of Index Contention
Strate SQL 