Internals Matter: Why You Should Check Your Page Verify Settings

This post is about two things:

1) Your Page Verification Settings are Critical

You should confirm you are running with the correct page verification settings on your SQL Server databases. It’s very important, and I’ll show you why.

2) I Should Attend the Awesome SQLSkills Master Immersion Event - Internals and Performance

My scripts to demo the importance of page verification settings are part of  my entry to win free registration to the SQLSkills Master Immersion Event on Internals and Performance in February. Read more about the training here.

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Read from the Right End of the Index: BACKWARD Scans

Optimizing queries is the most fun when you don’t need to add indexes. There’s nothing quite so nice as finding a way to make reading data faster, without slowing down writes or creating new data structures that need to be maintained.

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SQLPASS Day 2- Optimization Timeouts and All about TLogs

SQLPass unfortunately can’t last forever, but happily it’s still going strong. Here’s some highlights from my Day #2.

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Troubleshooting 1.00.001: sp_who2 and the SQL Server Log

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.

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What Articles are being Replicated, and How Big are They?

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.

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Management Studio 2008- What I Like

There’s some pretty cool things about SSMS 2008– I am really pleased that execution plans open graphically by default now, and it’s easy to view the XML on demand. I had gotten pretty fast at saving things as .sqlplan, but it was a bit of a drag.

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A Script to Summarize Blocking

Update from Kendra (Nov 2018): I’m keeping this post for posterity, but I REALLY don’t recommend the script. You’d be much better off using a production monitoring tool that did this job, or @AdamMachanic ‘s sp_WhoIsActive.

Maybe you’re a user in a reporting database running a long query in the read committed isolation level, merrily blocking a process which needs to load data.

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