SQL doctor Development Blog

The right tool for the job

George — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:57:37 +0000

I read a blog post from Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) explaining recent encounters he had with a plumber and an exterminator. In this post he shows the great service provided by both professionals and that he was happy to pay each professional a prorated rate of about $1,000 dollars per hour. Wow! How do they make [...]

Pinal Dave Interview

George — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:40:37 +0000

We recently released SQL doctor 2.0, which now quickly prioritizes wait statistics and provides expert level advice for alleviating bottlenecks and other performance issues. To create the wait stat recommendations we worked closely with industry experts like SQL Server MVP and SQLAuthority.com founder, Pinal Dave, to help users analyze wait statistics and quickly improve server [...]

THREADPOOL waits high after upgrade from SQL2000

George — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:04:48 +0000

You may be inadvertently limiting the number of worker threads available to the SQL Server process. This could be caused from the ‘max worker threads’ option being set to 255 after the upgrade of the SQL Server 2000 instance to a later version of SQL Server. On SQL Server 2000, the default setting for ‘max [...]

Wait Stats: Where to start?

George — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:57:31 +0000

I have spent a significant amount of time researching SQL Server wait stats on the web to find the best information currently available on the subject. There are a myriad of resources on the web discussing wait stats and I quickly found out how time consuming it is to extract the diamonds from the rough. [...]

Using the wait resource for PAGE% wait types

George — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 23:38:52 +0000

Earlier this week I was researching a performance issue on a SQL Server instance using the ‘sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks’ and ‘sys.dm_exec_requests’ DMV’s and noticed a ton of page latch and page io latch waits. This is nothing unusual when dealing with performance issues and is normally just one of the signs of poorly written queries, missing indexes, [...]

Parallelism: Stop waiting!

George — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:26:12 +0000

In my previous blog post ‘Parallelism: Hurry up and wait’ I discussed how parallel queries cause CXPACKET waits. I also covered the common causes for these waits to be high on an OLTP server. Today I want to finish up my thoughts on the subject and hopefully round out the discussion for both OLTP and [...]

Parallelism: Hurry up and wait

George — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 23:18:55 +0000

At the 2010 SQL PASS Summit we had the great pleasure of speaking with the well known SQL Server MVP Pinal Dave (blog). One of the topics that were discussed was the use of wait stats by SQL doctor for generating recommendations and he agreed to spend extra time with us to discuss his [...]

Import recommendations into a SQL Server table

George — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:51:23 +0000

Last week I explained how SQL doctor can export recommendations to an Excel spreadsheet. I now want to cover how you can take that exported spreadsheet and import the data into a SQL Server table. There is a Microsoft Support article (321686) that shows how to import data into SQL Server from Excel. This article [...]

SQL Doctor encounters ‘The Scary DBA’

George — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:36:44 +0000

Earlier this week a colleague of mine frantically ran up to my desk asking if I had read the SQL Doctor review by ‘The Scary DBA’. For some reason my initial reaction was to fall backwards out of my chair (almost falling out of the window and squashing the painter that happened to be outside [...]

Export recommendations to Excel

George — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 22:05:52 +0000

One of the most requested features during the Beta of SQLdoctor was the ability to export the recommendation list. Since this was such a popular request, I wanted to cover the steps required to successfully export the recommendation list to an Excel spreadsheet. Once a SQL Server instance has been successfully analyzed with SQLdoctor, open [...]