Today’s hypervisors like Hyper-V and vSphere make it easy to virtualize servers like SQL Server. However, they can also make it easy to create poorly performing virtualized SQL server instances. In this article I’ll cover some of the biggest mistakes that you can make when virtualizing SQL Server. Some of the top mistakes to avoid […]
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It wasn’t that long ago that many companies thought that you couldn’t virtualize SQL Server because it was too resource intensive. However, with the advances that both Microsoft and VMware have made to Hyper-V and vSphere respectively today’s virtualization platforms are more than capable of running almost every enterprise workload – including SQL Server. This […]
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Provisioning a new server has become increasingly easy with virtualization. Provisioning data, however, can be more challenging, especially in Agile shops where the volume of environments required to support dev and testing can easily go beyond the abilities of your IT operations to keep up. Is there any way to make it easier? We brought […]
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Be it SQL Server or the improved version of SQL Server on the cloud called as SQL Azure, when it comes to monitoring, there is nothing as powerful as DMVs (Dynamic Management Views). For a primer, Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a set of virtual views which expose the internal states of SQL Server deployment. […]
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If you ever ask a SQL Server DBA about most frequently faced performance issue in SQL Server, they would most likely say blocking or high CPU. A smart DBA would first confirm that high CPU is caused by SQL Server by looking at performance monitor. Once it is confirmed who is consuming high amount of […]
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The prior article discussed the Oracle library cache, the difference between a hard parse and a soft parse, and a bit on bind variable processing as well. To review, Oracle hard parsing reads in statistics, utilizes index information and creates an execution plan. Soft parsing already has the execution plan and doesn’t need to revisit the statisticsand […]
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The prior article finished the discussion on hard parsing. This article will take a look at some of the explain plan content then wrap up with what to look for when you have poorly performing SQL. Up to now, we have been discussing how Oracle processes SQL, the hard and soft parse processes, and how […]
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The prior article in this series finished the discussion on hard parsing. This article will take a look at the explain plan and discuss the order of processing and what the steps actually mean. Please be sure to read these articles in the proper order as they each build on the prior article! Let’s review […]
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The prior article started a discussion on the hard parsing process. It left off with the query transformation step. Please read these articles in the proper order as they each build on the prior article. The next step in the hard parse process is the permutations, as shown in the Figure below, taken from the […]
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In a previous article, I discussed the PLAN_TABLE and its role in SQL tuning for Oracle. This article will discuss using this PLAN_TABLE to display SQL execution plans, or explain plans. Technically, the Oracle Hard Parse process produces an execution plan. The explain plan is the visualization of this execution plan. I use the terms synonymously. […]
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How many times you have heard this question: “Why is SQL Server consuming so much memory?” If you ask a DBA who knows the functionality of SQL Server, the answer would be, “That is an expected behavior! Limit max server memory of SQL Server if you are concerned.” One might then wonder why SQL Server doesn’t release […]
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SQL Server 2014 introduced the new database engine enhancement called In-Memory OLTP. This feature uses new data structures which are optimized for in-memory access of table. People normally call it In-Memory database. In reality, we would like to call it partially in-memory database because SQL Server allows us to have few hot tables in-memory and […]
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