SQL SERVER – 10 Questions Where YES May Be a Wrong Answer – Performance Health Check

Today’s blog post created from a recent conversation with one of my customers. They asked me a very interesting question – “When should they hire me for my famous Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check?”. I send them following 10 questions and told them to take a quick quiz about their SQL Server Environment. They replied back to with YES to all the answers. If the answer to any of the following questions in YES, that means user can for sure improve your SQL Server’s Performance. After taking this quick test, my customer realized that they have amazing potential to improve the performance of their server.

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SQL SERVER – sp_readrequest – Long Running Process

Just another day while doing performance tuning engagement, Senior DBA of the organization and I both noticed that one of the SP sp_readrequest is continuously listed as long running SP. Well, the good part was that it was not taking too much of the resources. The page read and write were pretty low and the SP was not blocking anything at all. Initially we decided to ignore this SP as there were quite a lots of other things which we needed to take care to get maximum performance of the server.

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SQL SERVER – TDE Effects on TempDB’s Slow Performance

I am a big supporter of the fact that testing and playing with new features should not be done on production environments. It can prove to be harmful, even after you tried to clean up the system. Sometimes we are not sure what the impact of our acts can lead to. In a recent consulting engagement, I figured this out the hard way. I was brought in for slow performance suddenly and we were not sure what was happening in the system. I love tough challenges and this was no different.

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SQL SERVER – CLONEDATABASE: Generate Statistics and Schema Only Copy of the Database

I have been writing about how some of the interesting enhancements made with SQL Server 2016 SP1 have caught my attention. This one is a killer feature that can be of great value when you are trying to do testing. Having said that, I also want to call out that this feature has been added with SQL Server 2014 SP2 too. When you get into performance problems related to the query optimizer, then this capability will be of great advantage. In this blog post we will learn about Generate Statistics and Schema Only Copy of the Database.

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