HQ recently posted a brief update on our search for a location for 2013 [http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/PASSBlog/entryid/273/The-Debate-PASS-Summit-2013.aspx] . It includes links to posts by four Board members and two community members. I’d like to add my thoughts to the mix and ask you…
I’m trying to make TraceTune [http://www.tracetune.com/] (and eventually ClearTrace) work the way I do. My typical query tuning session goes like this: 1. Run a trace and upload to TraceTune/ClearTrace 2. Tune the slowest queries 3. Goto 1 I might do this two or three…
I’ve been a Google user so long I can hardly remember what I used before it. Alta Vista maybe? Or Yahoo. I’ve tried Bing off and on but it never really stuck. I probably care more about search engines than your average user because of their impact on…
Every fiscal year PASS creates a detailed budget. This helps us set priorities and communicate to our members what we’re going to do in the upcoming year. You can review the current budget on the PASS Governance [http://www.sqlpass.org/AboutPASS/Governance.aspx] page. That page currently requires…
I updated TraceTune [http://www.tracetune.com/] over the weekend. I increased the trace file upload size to 20MB. We’ve processed over half a million rows of trace data so far and I’m confident this won’t kill the server. I added average CPU and average disk reads…
It was a long time coming and I hope worth the wait. If you have SQL Server 2008 R2 installed on the same box as ClearTrace [http://www.scalesql.com/cleartrace/default.aspx] and you download the latest ClearTrace build (36) [http://www.scalesql.com/cleartrace/download.aspx] you’ll…
When I visit clients for the first time and conduct a performance review I introduce them to ClearTrace [http://www.scalesql.com/cleartrace/default.aspx]. It’s still the best way I know to identify exactly which queries are consuming the most resources. The downside is that it needs to…
Each week I send out a SQL Server newsletter [http://www.sqlteam.com/newsletter.aspx] and include links to interesting blog posts. I’ve linked to over 500 blog posts so far in 2010. Late last year I started storing those links in a database so I could do a…
I recently spent some time troubleshooting odd query plans and came to the conclusion that we needed better statistics. We’ve been running sp_updatestats but apparently it wasn’t sampling enough of the table to get us what we needed. I have a pretty limited window at night where…
After the Summit we send out a survey to capture feedback. We ask a consistent set of questions so we get good year over year results. I’ve watched blog posts and email threads with ideas for a better Summit. I got to sit with Denny and crew again on…