Analysis Services performance monitoring starts with one habit: take measurements before users complain. This guest post by Bill Anton explains what to measure for processing and for queries, and why the OLAPQueryLog table tells only part of the story.
Reads per Execution: Ranking Queries by Average I/O
The query with the most total reads is not always the one to tune first. Here is how to rank by cost per call and read the spread.
Finding Databases That Have Never Been Backed Up
Your backup job is green, but is every database in it? Here is a read-only way to find the ones missing from msdb history.
Agent Tokens in Job Steps: Job Name, Step and Start Time
A copied job should log its own name, not the old one. Agent tokens do that, if you escape them the right way.
Disabling All Agent Jobs During a Freeze and Restoring Their State
Enable-all after a freeze wakes up jobs that were off on purpose. Save the starting state and put back exactly that.
Investigating a Past Slowdown With the system_health Session
Nobody was tracing when it got slow. The system_health session was. Here is how to read what it kept before the files roll over.
Scheduling an Agent Job for Weekday Office Hours Only
Stop a monitoring job from waking anyone at 3 AM. Build the schedule, decode the weekday mask, and see what the window does not cover.