Performance tuning is hard. Everyone knows that. Has anyone ever tried to figure out why? Sure, there’s that big old “it depends” that gets tossed about. Look, at the end of the day you only have so many possible resource bottlenecks: disk, memory, CPU, and network. I don’t care if you are running Linux, Unix, … Read more
Well, I finally joined Slideshare. Here are the slides from my most recent presentation (Database Design, Size DOES Matter!) to the SQL Server User Group in Reno, Nevada last week: I’m going to see about pushing many of my presentations to Slideshare in the coming months. I like the idea of Slideshare, just not sure … Read more
Parameter sniffing is an aspect of SQL Server that is typically viewed as a bad thing. The simple fact is that SQL Server uses parameter sniffing all the time, that’s how SQL Server works. It is only those times when parameter sniffing results in performance issues that people (naturally) complain. It’s a lot like lawyers. It only … Read more
Years ago I left school after getting my graduate degree in Mathematics and got myself a real job, you know the one that had things like a pension and health insurance. Since it was only the cost of a co-pay I decided to visit a doctor to have a physical done because, well, isn’t that … Read more
This past November the Transaction Processing Performance Council (the TPC) released a new benchmark, the TPC-VMS. If you are interested in the details you can download the PDF by clicking here. The TPC benchmarks have been the industry standard when it comes to benchmarking database performance. As more companies move towards virtualization solutions the standard TPC … Read more
We all know that statistics get updated when you rebuild your indexes, right? OK, for those of you that are not aware of such things here is a blog post from Benjamin Nevarez (blog | @BenjaminNevarez) on the topic. He does a great job of explaining the subtle differences involved with various index and statistics … Read more
