Performance

A look at PostgreSQL 9.6 – The wait interface

For a long time there was no real wait interface in PostgreSQL core. Now, with the upcoming 9.6, pg_stat_activity was extended to provide more meaningful information for what a session is currently waiting on.

SQL Server 2016: new database-scoped configuration parameters part 2

In this blog post, let’s continue with other database-scoped options shipped with the SQL Server 2016 RC0. We will first begin with the first one and my preferred option: setting the MAXDOP value for(…)

SQL Server 2016 : nonclustered columnstore index and aggregate pushdown

Did you miss aggregate pushdown capability shipped with columnstore index? Well, I remember the first time I heard about it is was when I read the very interesting blog post of Niko Neugebauer here with a(…)

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(…)