Transcript

Welcome to Troubleshooting Blocking and Deadlocks for Beginners. I’m Kendra Little.

I’m a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server. I love teaching people to tune SQL Server the exact same way that I learned: by encountering problems, proposing solutions, and testing them out to prove that they work.

In this course, I’ll show you awesome, free tools built into SQL Server that let you prove: is blocking a problem on that instance?

• They let you get easy, simple notifications when blocking strikes.
• There’s free scripts you can grab online that will help you troubleshoot when blocking strikes. Who’s blocking who?
• You can also configure your SQL Server to record information about blocking so that when you’re not there you can look back afterwards and see which queries were involved in who is causing slow performance on your SQL Server.
• I’ll show you also how you can get diagnostic information for deadlocks so that when the worst blocking happens and the SQL Server itself has to step in and kill off one of your queries, you can decode what went down and propose solutions to keep the deadlock from happening again.

It took me a long time to find these free tools and to learn how to use them

But it doesn’t have to take YOU that long! I spent a lot of time writing code that I didn’t need to write and struggling to understand free tools just because there’s so much out there.

I’m going to show you tools that will hone in on your problems and that also won’t look at your SQL Server so closely that you’re at risk of it slowing down the SQL Server. Now, all monitoring is going to have some impact on the thing that we monitor. But in this course I’m gonna guide you to tools that you can use to lightly observe the SQL Server so that you don’t cause more problems as you’re trying to solve problems.

In this course, we’ll use the WideWorldImporters sample database from Microsoft. It’s easy to download and you can also grab free load testing tools. I’ll show you how to use these tools against a test SQL Server so that you can simulate different blocking scenarios, just like happens in the real world.

Let’s go ahead and get started and fight some blocking.