How To: Automate Continuous SQLServer Activity with Stored Procedures and Powershell Jobs
Category:
performance-tuning
It’s often useful to be able to run a bunch of stored procedures in the background over a period of time against a test instance.
Category: performance-tuning
Be Prepared: Collecting Data from sp_WhoIsActive in a Table
Category:
performance-tuning
I am a fangirl of Adam Machanic’s free sp_whoisactive stored procedure.
One of the great things about sp_whoisactive is that it’s very quick to generate a table to collect the data you need, then run the procedure in a loop with a wait statement to regularly collect the data you want over an interval.
Filling in Data Potholes Redux: Tally Tables vs CTEs
Category:
performance-tuning
In A Previous Installment… our heroine (that’s me) rediscovered CTEs, specifically in the recursive style. That was in my post “Filling in Data Potholes with Recursive CTEs.”
SQL PASS Day 1: To Free or Not To Free the Proc Cache?
Category:
performance-tuning
Yesterday was day 1 of SQL PASS 2009. I am attending a variety of sessions on execution plans this year, and along the way I heard three very different opinions yesterday on managing the procedure cache in presentations.
Who is using space in tempdb, and what is their execution plan?
Category:
performance-tuning
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.
Finding Plans and Stats for Queries Based on Wildcard Text Matching
Category:
performance-tuning
I often need to find a query plan in the cache for a process that has run long overnight. Typically I’ll be able to figure out from our logging some of the tables involved in the query. Sometimes I will have most of the executing text but won’t know exactly what dates or reference points were included.
Index Usage Statistics with ColumnList and Index Size
Category:
performance-tuning
As an add on to my last post, here is what I currently do use to track index usage. This shows usage, columns in the index, and index size on disk. The size can be quite useful to know when evaluating how much an index is worth– typically if this index is large then you’re paying a fair amount on the inserts.