troubleshooting

What are the best tools to collect and baseline wait statistics? Should you write your own? Watch the 18 minute video or read the episode transcript below.

You finally got approval to move to new hardware and a fresher version of SQL Server. After months of work,  you do the migration and then… performance gets worse. What can cause this, and what do you look for?

Psssttt – I have an updated blog post on this called the Learner’s Guide to SQL Server Performance Tuning

The SQL Server is slow, what should you do? I answer a reader question and share my strategy for performance troubleshooting.

Never, ever, disable backups to fix a performance problem.

If you’re not having a performance crisis, you might look at that sentence and say, “Wow, that’s super dumb! Who would ever do that?”

Well, a lot of people, actually. It’s pretty common.

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.

When setting up data collection using the GUI, configuration failed halfway through setup. At the point  of failure I found there were SQL Agent jobs for collections visible, but nothing appearing  in Management Studio under Management\Data Collection. The Data Collection icon still had the ‘off’ down red arrow. (I manually refreshed it for good measure to make sure.)

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.