Category Archives: Database Administration

SQL Server Monitoring Checklist

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It’s been awhile since I have worked on my checklist series of blog posts that will eventually be turned into a book. This time around the checklist focuses on the kinds of things you might want to monitor on your SQL Server instance to ensure that they are working as you expect.

Unlike some of my previous checklists, this one is different in the fact that the checklist is asking if you are monitoring a particular aspect of a SQL Server instance, and if you are, how you are performing the monitoring, and how often are you performing the monitoring. My goal is not to suggest what you should monitor, how you should monitor, or how often you should monitor, but only to get started thinking about what kinds of things you should be monitoring on a periodic basis. Towards the end of the list I have provided a list of some of the more common ways you might consider monitoring different aspects of your SQL Server instances.

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Checkout SQLServerIO.com for Useful Information on SQL Server Storage Systems

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At the recent SQLSaturday #28 in Baton Rouge, LA, I had the opportunity to meet Wes Brown (Blog | Twitter), and attend his session on “Understanding Storage Systems and SQL Server”. I enjoyed his presentation and also discovered that Wes has a blog where he shares his deep knowledge of SQL Server I/O. If you are interested in learning more about SQL Server I/O, his blog offers useful posts, presentations, and some software tools he has written for himself. For example, he has a Disk Drive RAID Configuration Tool that you can use to help give you an idea of RAID performance based on drive characteristics and other factors.

How Do You Defragment Your SQL Server Indexes

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I give a lot of presentations based on best practices, and in all of them I stress the importance of regularly rebuilding or reorganizing indexes. Both the REBUILD and the REORGANIZE options have their pros and cons, so I thought it would be interesting to do a poll to see which method(s) was preferred by DBAs. The results are to the left.

After seeing the results of the poll (which was not scientifically designed), I was rather impressed with how many DBAs use a combination of both the REBUILD and the REORGNIZE methods to defragment their indexes. To me, this indicates a high level of knowledge of how to best defragment indexes, as using a combination of both options allows the DBA to choose which method is best for a particular index, rather than taking the brute force method of using either REBUILD or REORANIZE to defragment all of their indexes.  I was also impressed that only a very small percentage of the poll’s respondents didn’t defragment their indexes, or know what index defragmentation was.

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How to Performance Tune a VLDB on your Desktop

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Recently, I wrote a review of Red Gate Software’s new SQL Virtual Restore software. SQL Virtual Restore allows you to quickly turn a compressed backup into a live, virtual database, with the advantage that the virtual database is substantially smaller than the original database, while at the same time acting identically to the production database.

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Windows OS Power Saving Feature Directly Affects CPU Performance

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While I have always known that the Windows operating system Power Plan options affect a server’s performance, I had not realized how much until SQL Server MVP Glenn Berry (Blog | Twitter) suggested I try out my new Dell T610 test servers under the three available power savings plans:

  • High Performance
  • Balanced
  • Power Saver

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