You’ve got a performance problem and you know just the cool index trick that will fix it!
Until it goes utterly wrong.
Join me for this free session in the 24 hours of PASS to see multiple quick demos of index changes that seem like a great idea… until they either don’t work, or make things worse.
My session is on Wed, July 19, 9 am Pacific / 12 pm Eastern / 4pm UTC.
Microsoft recently gave us a more lightweight way to trace data related to execution plan performance. As of SQL Server 2014 SP2, you can trace the query_thread_profile Extended Event.
When I was recently working on the course, “Should Developers Manage Index Maintenance?” I explained that in my experience, statistics maintenance can make more of a difference to performance than index maintenance can.
They say, “never read the comments” on the internet, but I’m lucky to get lots of interesting points and questions in my comments.
SQL Server has more than one way to pull pages in from disk for your queries. SQL Server can do a physical read of an 8KB page, or an extent of 8 of those 8KB pages.
Perfmon counters are an excellent tool for monitoring and sometimes troubleshooting Microsoft SQL Server. But some counters can get you into trouble, because they don’t mean what many people think. Learn what to look out for in the world of widely-used perfmon counters.
I’ve got a whole bunch of free, live webcasts scheduled on SQL Server training! I’d love for you to join me for these sessions.
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.