The Slow Growing Problems
Not every problem is going to fire off an alert, but it still might be something that you want to track.
2026-06-15
294 reads
Monitoring
Create and Read the Analysis Services Flight Recorder
This article explains how to customize an extended events session in SQL Server Analysis Services for auditing and monitoring
2025-11-05
1,701 reads
How to Measure Replication Latency in SQL Server AlwaysOn Synchronous Availability Groups
Synchronous replicas in SQL Server Availability Groups promise no data loss, but they don’t promise zero delay; under heavy load they can still fall behind. This article shows how to measure and track that hidden replication delay using SQL Server performance counters, so you can see how well your system keeps up during IO‑intensive operations and plan maintenance more safely.
2025-09-17
2025-07-23
6,500 reads
Multiple Monitoring Tools
Steve wonders if it is worth it to use multiple monitoring systems for a database.
2025-06-20
165 reads
What Metrics Do You Collect?
Monitoring and observability are becoming more important in today's 24x7x365 environment for applications. Steve asks what data helps you solve problems today. Tell us what's important to you.
2024-06-28
228 reads
How using a database monitoring tool helps DBAs create value for the whole organization
The rise of cross platform databases which are both on-premises and in the cloud, alongside decreasing customer satisfaction and trust in digital channels, has increased the importance - and value - of enhanced database monitoring. Find out how using a database monitoring tool creates value for the whole organization.
2023-12-08
Scaling Up Monitoring
How do we design a monitoring system? The Amazon Prime team realized they didn't do a good job and changed their architecture.
2023-05-31
219 reads
Metrics and Measures
We need to measure and monitor things to become better, but we need to keep an eye on what the actual goal is from this monitoring.
2023-03-20
175 reads
The Complexity of Metrics
We need to monitor our servers, but individual metrics have more complexity than just setting simple limits for their readings.
2023-02-06 (first published: 2023-01-30)
367 reads
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers