Collecting perfmon counters from SQL Server databases where you are using database mirroring is a little tricky
The counters won’t behave “normally” until after you set up mirroring for a database.
You’ve got some troubling wait stats in SQL Server. How can you tell which queries are causing those waits?
Learn the pros and cons of different techniques to track down the cause of both common and tricky waits in SQL Server, including CXPACKET, PAGEIOLATCH, LCK, RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE, and THREADPOOL waits.
Batch mode was introduced as a way to help SQL Server process data from columnstore indexes faster. The whole idea with columnstore is that you pull big compressed sets of rows out for aggregation or other operations in big chunks.
Batch mode is a way that operators can work on a “batch” of up to 900 values at a time, instead of working on individual rows. Batch mode can reduce the overhead of metadata and make more efficient use of your CPUs.
Every now and again, I need use a global temporary table for some testing or demo code.
Each time I do, I stumble a little bit when it comes to checking for the existence of the global temp table, in order to make my code re-runnable.
I recently did a Dear SQL DBA episode answering a question about lock timeouts and memory in SQL Server. I really enjoyed the episode, and thought it would be fun to follow up and show what it looks like if SQL Server doesn’t have enough memory to allocate locks.
An important query is suddenly slow. Is it because statistics are out of date? This is tricky to figure out, and updating statistics right away can make troubleshooting even harder. Learn how to use query execution plans to get to the heart of the question and find out if stats are really your problem, or if it’s something else.
In this 35 minute episode:
Code samples are at the bottom of the page
I’ve never claimed to be great at math, but until recently I thought I knew how to count to one. Zero… one. That’s what we learned in kindergarten.
Apparently SQL Server didn’t go to kindergarten.
Copyright (c) 2025, Catalyze SQL, LLC; all rights reserved. Opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Kendra Little of Catalyze SQL, LLC. Content policy: Short excerpts of blog posts (3 sentences) may be republished, but longer excerpts and artwork cannot be shared without explicit permission.