I had an interesting problem a few weeks back where the I/O performance stats for a SQL Server 2000 disks were jumping off the charts. The company I am currently working for does not have the infrastructure to dedicate sets of disks for every single Database and as such, a number of databases share the same physical raid array.
If you're a user of PerfMon (any DBA should have at some point), Physical I/O by disk falls short of being able pinpoint the problem areas as all I was able to ascertain was that Disk F (which has 20 + Db's) was busy. I needed to delve deeper and check which of these databases the culprit was.
As a result I came across a system function called ::fn_virtualfilestats. This function is able to return the I/O stats for a given database file since the SQL service was last started.
I added this function to sp_MSForEachDB and got my top 5 busiest databases based on I/O. This pinpointed the busiest DB's on the SQL server which, hey presto included the culprit causing the extremely high I/O.
Use the script below to provide a useful insight into the I/O requests and wait times of all your Server databases.
Script includes some simple reports detailing the TOP 5 busiest Databases based on:
For more information on the counters and result sets used in this script see :
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187309.aspx
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Steve Jones Editor, SQLServerCentral.com
