A common SQL Server crime is the unnecessary overuse of ad-hoc queries by applications. In this article, Phil Factor shares some custom queries for monitoring problems that can be caused by this.  Read more...

This article will discuss why deadlocks occur, why they require immediate investigation by the DBA, and the diagnostic data required to troubleshoot them.  Read more...

There is nothing wrong with the principle of using ad-hoc queries; one can use them occasionally and perfectly legitimately. However, when ad-hoc queries run as part of a processes that does database operations iteratively, row-by-agonizing-row, they can be one of the most unremitting ways of sapping the performance of a SQL Server instance.  Read more...

In this article, Redgate use the Spectre/Meltdown bugs as means to demonstrate how you can use a tool like SQL Monitor to assess the impact of patching on your SQL Server estate.  Read more...

Redgate’s James King and Ben Emmett will demonstrate how to troubleshoot your SQL Server estate, and discuss how it shouldn’t be about reacting to problems when they occur, but rather having the tools to make proactive decisions to plan ahead, identify potential disruptions, fix common problems and make improvements.   Read more...

This article will show you how to set up SQL Monitor to monitor Azure-based clustered instances right alongside your on-premise clusters.  Read more...

The SQL Monitor team are hard at work, improving how you manage your alerts. Find out more about the changes they're making, and how you can try an online demo of the new features now.  Read more...

This quick tip will review how SQL Monitor 7 has incorporated SQL Code Guard’s built-in set of Performance Rules for static code analysis. These rules are designed to highlight SQL syntax that could potential cause performance problems, and so indicate ways to improve the overall quality and performance of the workload, over time.  Read more...

Sudden performance issues in SQL Server can have many causes, ranging all the way from malfunctioning hardware, through to simple misconfiguration, or perhaps just end users doing things they shouldn’t. But one particularly common culprit is when deployments go wrong: I don’t know a single DBA who hasn’t been burned by a bad release.  Read more...

SQL Monitor’s dev team has made huge improvements to the product over the last year. In the first half of 2017 alone, they released reporting capabilities, support for collecting metrics from VMWare hosts, significant improvements to performance and scalability, improved configurability of alerts, as well as dozens of smaller enhancements. Since we’re about half way through 2017, it’s time to talk about the plans for the rest of the year.  Read more...

The Redgate SQL Monitor team has been looking into how you can more effectively monitor SQL Server running on a virtual machine, and are pleased to announce that they've begun this by introducing support for VMware in SQL Monitor version 7.0.11. Find out more about the beta feature in this blog post.  Read more...

When something's wrong with your database you need to be able to identify the primary pain points within SQL Server and get to the root cause of the problem fast. Grant Fritchey explains how you can use execution plans inside SQL Monitor to help quickly and simply identify the problem.  Read more...

Learn about deadlocks and how you might better troubleshoot the issues involved.  Read more...

Any SQL Server monitoring tool must gather the metrics that will allow a DBA to diagnose CPU, memory or I/O issues on their SQL Servers. It should also provide a set of accurate, reliable, configurable alerts that will inform the DBA of any abnormal or undesirable conditions and properties, as well as specific errors, on any of the monitored servers. This article provides an in-depth guide to the monitoring and alerting functionality available in one such tool, Redgate SQL Monitor. It focuses on the latest edition (5.0), which includes several key new features, such as performance diagnosis using wait statistics, the ability to compare to baselines, and more.  Read more...

This metric is useful if you want to know exactly how much physical space a particular table is taking up, including the size of its indexes.  Read more...

Anthony Nocentino, experienced Enterprise Architect and Friend of Redgate, explains the challenges presented by monitoring Availability Groups and shows you a technique for monitoring AG replication latency with Redgate SQL Monitor and its Custom Metric functionality.  Read more...

This metric measures the amount of memory used by the total number of ad-hoc queries that are currently in the plan cache. If the value is high, it indicates memory is being wasted by storing the execution plans of queries that will never be run more than one time.  Read more...

This metric shows Writelog wait time in ms, per elapsed second. Writelog wait types occur when the log cache is being flushed to disk. If this happens all the time, it may suggest disk bottlenecks where the transaction log is stored.  Read more...

This is a good general indicator of performance problems. High stall times indicate I/O problems, which can be attributed to busy physical disks or queries that return large data sets to the client.  Read more...

This metric collects the number of 8-kilobyte pages that make up the plan cache to help identify memory pressure or plan cache pollution. A sudden drop in values for this metric may indicate that the instance is under memory pressure and SQL Server had to reclaim part of the plan cache for other use.  Read more...