I wish you knew a few things about VMware and SQL Server best practices. If you’ve ever asked yourself “Why does my storage seem slower on my SQL Server VMs?!”, this post may help. We love VMware in our SQL Server consulting practice. But there are some things you should know and do first. These … Read more
At Straight Path Solutions, we love performing SQL Server Health Assessments. These are our exams that dig quickly into the root of your SQL Server instance and find problems that you are currently suffering from. Then we give you an action plan to stop suffering from them today. Rather than just performing the checks and finding the … Read more
I do a lot of SQL Server Health Assessments on SQL Server environments. I’m always checking sys.configurations to look for problematic instance level configuration settings. I almost always find configurations worth changing. But the approach I’ve always used is a bit manual and I wanted to fix it. So I finally wrote a script to … Read more
When we do a SQL Server Health Assessment, we quickly dive into SQL Server performance and Windows/Physical/Virtual resource usage counters. During our kick off interview we always ask if you have a SQL Server baseline from the past to compare. Usually the answer is no, unfortunately. Like monitoring and alerting, many of the tools vendors make automated baseline collection tools. Also like alerting, though, … Read more
Period(*). I have two motives here. One – I liked the title and I’ve been having fun with titles lately (A couple weeks ago it was the true story of a SAN Failure with “Yes, Virginia, SANs Can Fail“). Two – it’s a good reminder and a couple recent conversations brought it up so I … Read more
Psst – My services are likely more expensive than the memory your SQL Server needs and wants. Your CIOs and Directors need to stop thinking they are buying servers and components in 2004, or even 2010. I do all sorts of consulting gigs for all different reasons, but a lot of tuning gigs and wellness … Read more
Is your SQL Server Linked Server Query running slow? Check your permissions. Maybe this is old news to you but it wasn’t for me –> It was a good day. We had finally migrated onto brand new hardware (and saw a 250% improvement in run times of most warehouse jobs). I had finally cleaned up … Read more