Performance Monitoring - Basic Counters

What counters should you monitor to baseline your servers? Which ones for checking performance? It's an interesting question and one that always leads Steve Jones to a wide range of sources in print and on the web. Steve compiled his own list and finally has put some words around the list to give some justification of why they are chosen. Read on and see how this compares to your list (you do have a list don't you?).

Preferred Node Policy-Setting on Traditional SQL Cluster

Preferred node setting facilitates instances on traditional cluster to be on the correct nodes which will lead to load-balancing of the resources.

Seven Monitoring Scripts

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!

SQL Server Execution Plans, Second Edition by Grant Fritchey

Every Database Administrator, developer, report writer, and anyone else who writes T-SQL to access SQL Server data, must understand how to read and interpret execution plans. This book leads you right from the basics of capturing plans, through how to interrupt them in their various forms, graphical or XML, and then how to use the information you find there to diagnose the most common causes of poor query performance, and so optimize your SQL queries, and improve your indexing strategy.

SQL Server Performance Dashboard Reports

Setting up SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) based performance dashboard driven off servers that are registered through a Central Management Server (CMS).

The Effect of NOLOCK on Performance

Using hints in a query is something that most DBAs don't ever seem to bother with, but when they do, NOLOCK seems to be their hint of choice. Wayne Fillis brings us a detailed examination of how this particular hint actually affects the performance of your system.

Understanding Graphical Execution Plans - Part 3: Analyzing the Plan

Learn how to examine and read a SQL Server execution plan in this article. This is the third part of a short series from Darren White that examines execution plans and imparts the basics on an important skill for DBA's and SQL developers alike.

Using A Block Predicate to Restrict Row Updates and Inserts

If you are using row level security in SQL Server 2016 you might find users are updating or inserting rows of data that keep them from seeing the row after they have performed the update or insert statement. If you want to prevent this from occurring, you can use a blocking predicate.

Byte Me: Avoiding Detection

Introducing Minion CheckDB by MinionWare

Minion CheckDB completes the MinionWare maintenance and backups suite in style. Each solution is plug-and-play for the busy DBA, and deeply configurable for those shops with in-depth needs.