Hocine Mechara

Understanding Head Blockers in SQL-Server

A customer of mine had a recurring issue with one of his business critical applications where everything was frozen and stuck for the users. The issue was caused due to a head blocking transaction which increased blocking in the database(…)

Keep an eye on your SQL Agent jobs using T-SQL!

Introduction: A couple of weeks ago I had a customer who was interested in monitoring the duration of some of his SQL-Agent jobs. The jobs were running in a data warehouse environment and were executing some ETL processes for loading(…)

SQL-Server: What are VLF’s and why should I care about them?

Introduction: What are VLF’s? In SQL-Server, the transaction log is divided into several logical units called virtual log files (VLF). The amount of virtual log files and their size are managed automatically by the database engine. The database engine adds(…)

SQL Server: Manage large data ranges using partitioning

Introduction:  When it comes to moving ranges of data with many rows across different tables in SQL-Server, the partitioning functionality of SQL-Server can provide a good solution for manageability and performance optimizing. In this blog we will look at the(…)