I’m teaming up with Erik Darling to teach you SQL Server Performance Tuning in two days at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle.
Erik and I are co-teaching both days of training to give you a strong strategic background on the internals you need to know, along with critical tactical performance tuning techniques. Join us to level up your perf tuning skills!
I’m a huge fan of SQL Server’s Query Store feature. Query Store collects query execution plans and aggregate query performance metrics, including wait stats. Having Query Store enabled makes troubleshooting performance issues such as bad parameter sniffing, much, much easier. Because Query Store is integrated into SQL Server itself, it also can catch query plans in a lightweight way that an external monitoring system will often miss.
When performance matters, it’s important to ensure that you’re managing Query Store so that Query Store cleanup does not run during high volume times. Query Store cleanup could slow your workload down significantly.
I’ve been an employee at small, medium, and large companies, and I’ve also been a short-term consultant working with a new company in any given week. I’ve worked with hundreds of tech companies remotely and have visited companies onsite on multiple continents.
Air-dropping into company cultures to work through problems with teams and present recommendations to their leadership reveals common anti-patterns in leadership – plus some patterns that make teams raving fans of their management.
Here’s the top 5 Toxic Flavors of Tech Execs I’ve encountered over 20 years, plus the Top 5 Team Building Tech Execs I’ve found, too.
Back in my 20’s, I was lucky enough to go to graduate school. I had a work-study job in the Dean’s office where I got to develop and administer their Access databases, which helped me get by.
One day, the Dean said to me: ‘Kendra, when you talk about your work on our databases, you light up. When you talk about your coursework, that doesn’t happen. Have you thought about that?’
Last November, a puzzle was really bothering me. Some queries from an application were timing out frequently after running for 30 seconds, but they were halfway invisible in the SQL Server.
It took me more than half hour to figure out how to start an XEvents trace on a read-scale out instance of Azure SQL Managed Instance. It’s hard to monitor read scale-out instances, so tracing is desirable! I started with a simple trace of sql_statement_completed. Hopefully this saves other folks some time.
If you use readable secondaries in Availability Groups or Read-Scale out instances in Azure SQL Managed Instance, you may have queries fail repeatedly if there is a glitch and statistics are not successfully ‘refreshed’ on the secondary replica. Those queries may keep failing until you manually intervene.
It’s unclear if Microsoft will ever fix this. There is a well established support deflection article which documents the issue and provides ‘workarounds’.
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