Last week, I wrote about what should have been a fast system but was performing very poorly, weighing heavily on tempdb I/O performance. Our original changes did not make much of a difference, but now…
During a recent engagement, the customer explained that the performance on their relatively small system was especially slow on Monday morning, but generally bad that entire day. The SQL Server 2008 R2 instance, which runs…
When we perform diagnostics on an existing SQL Server instance, or if we are setting up a new machine, it’s very important to make sure that we change the Max Server Memory setting to an…
Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are taking over. Last week, a client approached me to migrate their complex environment in two phases from two physical data centers, first to Azure VMs, and ultimately to…
I received some good feedback on my talk this Wednesday for the Calgary PASS Chapter. This has led me to consider transposing the content from a presentation format, to possibly a series of blog posts,…
I make a lot of assumptions in my day-to-day life, as well as in my job as an IT consultant. To mitigate the inherent arrogance of making assumptions, I have to remember to ask myself…
The local SQL PASS chapter in Calgary is hosting yours truly as the speaker for this month. I only have an hour, which I will easily go over, to talk about how I make SQL…
As the title says, I’ll be speaking at the Calgary SQL PASS User Group on 19 August 2015. My topic is SQL Server Performance Tuning Starter Kit, where I will tell you as much as…
Your production environment needs Date and Number tables, to help you Get Stuff Done in sets instead of RBAR*. Doug Lane has a video on Why You Simply Must Have a Date Table. I really…
A customer is running in a SQL Server 2000 environment, 32-bit AWE mode, on 64-bit Windows 2003 R2. The server has 16GB of RAM and 8 logical CPU cores. It’s running under VMWare. Storage is…