Never, ever, disable backups to fix a performance problem.
If you’re not having a performance crisis, you might look at that sentence and say, “Wow, that’s super dumb! Who would ever do that?”
Well, a lot of people, actually. It’s pretty common.
Your backups seem fine. They weren’t failing, the last time you checked. But trouble may be lurking.
Here’s the top 5 warning signs I’ve seen that backups haven’t been thought through.
Sometimes when SQL Server gets slow, developers and DBAs find that the problem is blocking. After lots of work to identify the query or queries which are the blockers, frequently one idea is to add ROWLOCK hints to the queries to solve the problem or to disable PAGE locks on the table. This often backfires - here’s why.
Before you do all the work to map out a complex sliding window table partitioning scheme for your SQL Server tables, here’s the top five questions I’d think through carefully: 1) Do You Need Table Partitioning? Some folks think they need partitioning for performance– but it really shines as a data management feature. Just because you’ve got tables with millions of rows in them doesn’t necessarily mean that partitioning will make queries faster.
It seems like this should be easy. But it’s not.
Over the years I’ve gotten lots of emails and questions from students that start like this:
Help! My partitioned table has the wrong data in a partition! It’s lopsided. I started trying to fix it, but…
SQL Server 2016’s new Query Store feature has an option that looks for “regressed” query plans.
But does it catch “bad” parameter sniffing?
SQL Server 2016’s new Query Store feature makes it easier than ever for DBAs and developers to identify the most important queries to tune– and perhaps apply a quick fix by pinning an execution plan.
Hindsight is everything. I was lucky to be trained by a great team of DBAs back when I first started with SQL Server. But it’s hard to know exactly what you really need to know, particularly as new tools are becoming available.
Planning to move to new hardware for your SQL Server? Techniques like log shipping and database mirroring can be incredibly useful to make the change fast and painless– but you’ve got to pick the right techniques for your environment ahead of time, and know how to do a few things that aren’t in the GUI.
Here are some of my favorite whitepapers and resources to get you going.
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