Performance

Sudden drop of the page life expectandy but don’t panic yet!

A couple of weeks ago, I had an interesting discussion with one of my customer about the page life expectancy (aka PLE). He asked me if monitoring the metric value is a best practice because he often noticed a big(…)

Changing an existing partition configuration … Well, not so easy!

This time let’s talk about an interesting customer scenario where table partitioning was implemented on a table with 100 GB of data on SQL Server 2014. Partitioning in this context aimed to save disk space  (archive data were compressed) , help(…)

NOLOCK is definitely not what you may expect …

For those who still believe that using nolock hint is a lock-free process, keep reading this blog post. I wrote a previous blog post 3 years ago, when I was at one of my customer and(…)

Enable 10046 Tracing for a specific SQL

Available methods to enable 10046 trace are described in My Oracle Support Note 376442.1. You can enable 10046-tracing – on session level (alter session) – for other sessions (e.g. with oradebug, the package DBMS_MONITOR or DBMS_SYSTEM) What is not(…)

SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups : session timeout parameter

Have you ever faced to timeout issues with SQL Server availability groups? If you take a look at the timeout parameters for an availability group, you will find a plenty of configuration settings. Indeed, you have timeout parameters(…)

SQL Server Extended Event: Eine Deadlock-Event aus der “system_health” Überwachung

Wie Sie vielleicht wissen, gibt es eine Überwachung über Extended Events: system_health. Kürzlich fragt mich ein Kunde an, um ein zufälliges Deadlock-Problem zu analysieren...

SQL Server Collation for System Center Products

A customer asks me, what is the collation for System Center products? Do we have a general collation for all products? And what is the BP for Tempdb? And how work the licencing for SQL Server in(…)

SQL Server 2016 query store

One of the most new interesting features that will be introduced by SQL Server 2016 is certainly the query store that will complete the performance tuning toolbox of database administrators. Basically, the query store will track queries, their query plans(…)

SSISDB is too big and it is not every time the retention period’s fault!

In all blogs that I read, the solution is just to change the retention period to a reasonable value. Yes, it is true but in some case you need to go deeper in the analysis… Like you, I(…)

Want to benchmark your storage? It’s time to switch to DiskSpd tool!

As you certainly know, the well-known tool SQLIO is officially deprecated since few months. From my part, I had the opportunity (maybe the last) to use SQLIO for a customer project in order to benchmark the storage for SQL Server(…)