Sometimes tempdb is filling up. Sometimes I just want to monitor the amount of tempdb and check out execution plans of heavy tempdb users while watching performance on a server.
This evening during some maintenance I was reminded of one very important rule: when looking into any issue on a windows server, never forget to check the Windows Event Log.
Today I was glancing at once of my servers and noticed the backup job was running later than normal. I haven’t been working with this server for long, so I glanced to check where the backup was writing to and checked the output directory. I found that a differential backup was being written, and that the differential backup from the day before was much larger than normal.
Update from Kendra (Nov 2018): I’m keeping this post for posterity, but instead of sp_who2, check out @AdamMachanic ’s sp_WhoIsActive, if you need a free tool to see what’s running in SQL Server.
I thought I would do a series of posts thinking through general troubleshooting steps I use for a wide variety of issues– everything from slow running performance, system crashes, or application failures where the source hasn’t been identified.
I needed to quickly report on what articles are being replicated from a database yesterday. It was helpful to include the size of the articles, number of rows, and the subscriber information.
The system tables make this pretty quick work.
Here’s a query I found useful today– this week we moved many of our production datamart servers to SQL 2K5 SP3 CU4, and today among the course of other issues I wanted to take a look at my job runtimes to see if they might be noticeably slower or faster than prior runs. I often am in a similar situation after deploying significant changes to our codebase.
This post is to share a script I’ve been working on periodically over the last couple of months to monitor and report on replication latency at the distributor.
I use this in monitoring transactional replication with a stand-alone distributor.
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