Monitoring SQL Server for performance is a critical part of a DBA’s job. In this article, Edward Pollack explains some of the SQL Server performance monitor data and how to collect it.
2021-07-21
Edward Pollack demonstrates how SQL Server plan cache mining can uncover a wealth of information to help with troubleshooting performance issues.
2021-05-21
A SQL Server query is suddenly running slowly, for no obvious reason. Grant Fritchey shares a 5-point plan to help you track down the cause and fix the problem.
2021-03-26
In this article we look at how to interpret and use the results of STATISTICS IO when tuning SQL Server queries.
2021-02-17
One of your SQL Server instance shows a major dip in performance or throughput, affecting all the user databases. You notice that the slow interludes coincide, as if orchestrated. On investigation, it appears that several transactions running over that period were using a lot of space in tempdb. However, which of them, if any, are causing the tempdb bottleneck, and why?
2021-01-26
Jeremiah Peschka, a tech lead for SQL Monitor development, explains the new SQL Server configuration options available for the data repository, and how enabling them might improve SQL Monitor performance, when reading and writing monitoring data.
2020-11-17
In this article, Edward Pollack describes some of the issues when querying against remote data sources. He covers remote SQL Servers and also connecting to a PostgreSQL database.
2020-10-30
Computed columns may be the cause of hard to track down performance issues. In this article, Robert Sheldon reviews the issues and some ways to get around them.
2020-10-12
In the final article of this series, Edward Pollack demonstrates the maintenance of columnstore indexes. He also takes a look at nonclustered columnstore and memory-optimized columnstore indexes.
2020-08-06
When the optimizer doesn’t estimate the correct amount of memory for a query, either memory is wasted that could be used for other processes or some operations will spill to disk. Microsoft has added Memory Grant Feedback to help overcome this issue. In this article, Greg Larsen explains what you need to know about this new feature.
2020-06-10
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Security on your SQL Server is important. That doesn’t need any explaining. But where...
It’s that time of year again! EightKB is back on August 20th at 13:00...
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In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?
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