While SQL Server's Profiler is a great tool, it can be hard to work with and we can easily miss information in the results. New author Solomon Rutzky brings us a short article that can help you to better configure your traces to get the information you need.   Read more...

Monitoring in the real world. Roy Carlson concludes his series on space monitoring for your SQL Servers with a real world example of how he found a problem and fixed it.   Read more...

Trending the size data for your databases can be crucial when ordering new hardware or just ensuring that you can handle the load. In Part 3, Roy Carlson looks at how you get the sizes needed for your instances into Excel and generate a chart for trending of this important piece of performance data.   Read more...

Continuing with his series on monitoring space, Roy Carlson looks at checking the space in a folder to be sure your SQL Server databases never run out of storage.   Read more...

SQL Server will autogrow your databases as they run out of space. But the process doesn't manage space, nor does it check the free space on the drive. Allowing autogrow to grow unchecked and unmanaged will eventually use up all the free disk space and potentially crash your server. New author Mark Nash brings you his system for monitoring space usage and generating a report that eases this process.   Read more...

In this series of articles, you will learn the basics of installing Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 as well as how to use MOM to monitor SQL Server. This article takes advantage of virtualization. We will use VMware Workstation 5 to create the lab to introduce you to the basics of installing MOM to monitor SQL Server.   Read more...

Part I of this article illustrated how to monitor CPU usage of running processes on a local machine or from a remote machine. This article illustrates how to monitor the CPU usage of different running processes on different machines and collect the information in a database.  Read more...

SQL Server Profiler can correlate Microsoft Windows System Monitor (Performance Monitor in Windows NT 4.0) counters with SQL Server or SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) events. Windows System Monitor logs system activity for specified counters in performance logs. The first thing to remember is in order to have correlating information you need to obviously be in sync - in other words you must start the perfmon trace and profiler trace at the same time or else they won't match up.  Read more...

Joe has a bunch of small, easy to use scripts that can definitely be the beginning of a great set of monitoring tool. Amazing how much info you can gather with a little bit of code!   Read more...

Xp_sendmail is a great utility that SQL Server provides in order to e-mail messages directly from SQL Server, by using a valid MAPI profile. However, its syntax is rather stringent. In this article by Kunal Das, he shows you how to send messages to a list of recipients generated by a query dynamically in T-SQL.   Read more...

SQL Server excels at quickly acquiring and releasing locks to allow as much concurrency as possible on the server. However there are times that one user will block another, which can be a source of great user frustration as well as making the system appear to be slow. Leo Peysakhovich brings us some great information and code on how you can monitor and deal with blocking on your SQL Server 2000 server.   Read more...

Andrew Zanevsky shares his trace-scrubbing procedures that make it easy for you to handle large trace files and aggregate transactions by type–even when captured T-SQL code has variations. SQL Server Profiler is a veritable treasure trove when it comes to helping DBAs optimize their T-SQL code. But, the surfeit of riches (I'm reminded of the Arabian Nights tale of Aladdin) can be overwhelming. I recently had one of those "sinking" feelings when I first tried to make sense of the enormous amount of data collected by traces on a client's servers. At this particular client, the online transactions processing system executes more than 4 million database transactions per hour. That means that even a 30-minute trace that captures "SQL Batch Completed" events results in a table with 2 million rows. Of course, it's simply impractical to process so many records without some automation, and even selecting the longest or most expensive transactions doesn't necessarily help in identifying bottlenecks. After all, short transactions can be the culprits of poor performance when executed thousands of times per minute.  Read more...

The system table, "sysperfinfo," is the representation of the internal performance counters of SQL Server. This article demonstrates how to retrieve and store information from "sysperfinfo" to a CSV file, so that it can be analyzed.  Read more...

One of the biggest performance gains built into SQL Server is the stored procedure. In this article by Brian Kelley, he shows you how to fully utilize, debug and monitor the caching of such objects.   Read more...

Auditing in SQL Server is something that is becoming more and more prevelant, and will likely become more regulated over time. Dinesh Asanka brings us a new article on the basics of SQL Servers most powerful auditing configuration, C2 level auditing.   Read more...

Analyzing the data storage in SQL Server databases is a bit of an art. It's a skill that takes some time to develop given that the tools are rather limited. DBCC SHOWCONTIG is one of the few ways in which you can get some insight into how SQL Server has structured your table on the disk. Joe Sack brings us another of his top xxx techniques with his ten queries that you can use to analyze the results of this command.   Read more...

Monitoring your SQL Servers is something every DBA must do. Checking job status, disk space, etc. is a frequent question seen in our forums. Pearl Knowledge Solutions has developed a product to help you easily setup monitoring on your servers from a web interface. SQLCentric gets 4 stars from author Bruce Szabo; read his detailed review on this fine product.   Read more...

SQL Server will autogrow your databases as they run out of space. But the process doesn't manage space, nor does it check the free space on the drive. Allowing autogrow to grow unchecked and unmanaged will eventually use up all the free disk space and potentially crash your server. New author Mark Nash brings you his system for monitoring space usage and generating a report that eases this process.   Read more...

Knowing which databases are being backed up is a critical thing for all DBAs to know. After reading an article on this subject, new author Santveer Singh decided to share his own techniques for checking SQL Server databases and their backup status. He shows us how to look for failed backups as well as find those databases which have not been backed up.   Read more...

Are you prepared to handle a full or partial failure of your AC system? Ever thought about what would happen if it did happen. Once again Andy offers comments on a real world incident. While we'd all like to think it will never happen to us, we think sharing these incidents is a great way to prevent it from happening to others.   Read more...

While SQL Server's Profiler is a great tool, it can be hard to work with and we can easily miss information in the results. New author Solomon Rutzky brings us a short article that can help you to better configure your traces to get the information you need.   Read more...

Continuing with his series on monitoring space, Roy Carlson looks at checking the space in a folder to be sure your SQL Server databases never run out of storage.   Read more...

Trending the size data for your databases can be crucial when ordering new hardware or just ensuring that you can handle the load. In Part 3, Roy Carlson looks at how you get the sizes needed for your instances into Excel and generate a chart for trending of this important piece of performance data.   Read more...