Query tuning is often the fastest way to accelerate SQL Server performance. Most often system-level server performance (memory, processors, and so on) improvement measures are ineffective and expensive. Expert developers believe most performance issues can be traced to poorly written queries & inefficient indexing, not hardware constraints. In fact, some performance issues can only be … Read more SQL Server Performance Tuning Tips

A Database Administrator (DBA) is like a racecar technician. Building and optimizing a high-performance vehicle requires minuscule fine-tuning and attention to detail. A tweak here and an adjustment there could shave just a fraction of a second from your lap time. Of course, that fraction of a second could determine whether you win or lose … Read more SQL and Database Performance Tuning Guide and Checklist: Expert Tips

You probably know someone with trust issues, but do you know if your database has trust issues? In other words, does your database have Check Constraints and Foreign Keys that are not trusted? If so, it’s important to realize that SQL Server may not be able to use them for query plans and optimization, which … Read more Does Your Database Have Trust Issues?

In a recent blog post entitled Is Logical Data Modeling Dead?, Karen Lopez (b | t) comments on the trends in the data modeling discipline and shares her own processes and preferences for logical data modeling (LDM). Her key point is that LDMs are on the decline primarily because they (and their creators) have failed to adapt to changing development … Read more What Happened to Logical Data Models (LDM)?

Naming conventions are a very subjective thing, of course. Just like coding styles, they can often lead to anything from minor debates to full-blown religious arguments. Upper case vs. lower case keywords, tabs vs. spaces, and where to put commas come to mind. Heck, these same people even get into sub-arguments about whether the terms “upper … Read more Subjectivity: Naming Standards

Recently I have spoken with a number of people about the key things that they monitor when it comes to SQL Server, with the key metrics CPU, Memory, and I/O mentioned. Some others set up alerts for specific errors or severity of errors, however one thing that comes up very rarely is monitoring for Suspect … Read more Monitoring for Suspect Pages

Let’s forget about performance for a moment, or even user-facing processes at all. A lot of tasks are admin-related and require at least the concept of looping, if not an explicit loop or cursor (or multiple). Think about how you would do these things in T-SQL otherwise:  The search ultimately needs to check every string column in … Read more 4 Practical Use Cases for Grouped Concatenation

What Prompted This Post? As lots of you know already, Kevin Kline (b | t) has joined us here at SQL Sentry. I’ve followed Kevin myself for a good while, so I’m really excited to have him here with us. One of the first things Kevin asked of me was to list the top 5 technical issues … Read more The Top 5 Most Common SQL Server Performance Problems