"... many factors may play a role ..."

That may qualify as the understatement of the year. You could have a 10MB database that could swamp a quad-quad server or...

Brian Carlson (12/22/2010)

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Our SAN is a Dell Equilogic. We don't have a SAN administrator, but the SA that takes care of it says that it's an old SAN and nothing...

Seems like you might have a misconfigured HBA (FC SAN)/NIC (iSCSI SAN). You didn't state which kind of SAN. Check read/write cache ratio if configurable, queue depth if...

Have you done a file IO stall and wait stats analysis? That is the first place to start.

Given the open ended nature of the question I highly recommend you...

Just want to clarify a statement: hyperbac can indeed compress (and encrypt) your backups and it will be faster than native backups because of this. As a side...

I'm with Jeff on this, as usual. Show the estimated query plan and not the incredibly FAT join line. Put your mouse over it and see the telephone...

1) Linked servers are often HORRIBLE from a performance standpoint, although there are things you can to do mitigate this.

2) Scalar UDFs can be even WORSE for performance.

I...

do a waitstats analysis and file IO stall analysis to determine the actual cause of the slowness, and then address that.

Please do yourself a favor and avoid maintenance plans altogether! Get the suite of free maintenance scripts/jobs at ola.hallengren.com and learn to use the incredible goodness there.

I HIGHLY recommend the free maintenance suite at ola.hallengren.com. The index maintenance part can provide this information for you.

tfifield (12/1/2010)

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Here's my 2 cents. I disagree with Kevin on this. Scalar functions can be very useful to encapsulate logic - especially for string handling and formatting like...

1) I recommend you force each index to be used with a hint and see the actual plan costs and especially the actual IO used. This is a good...

Or my tweet yesterday where I said you needed base-table permissions to update through...

Lowell (12/2/2010)

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exactly;

I've got one table, for example, that i update every two hours during biz hours ,...

Indianrock (12/1/2010)

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I see this morning that the plan cache went from being nearly empty for many hours and grew fairly rapidly up to a few GB starting at 12:45am....