SQL doctor Development Blog

I read a blog post from Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) explaining recent encounters he had with a plumber and an exterminator.  In this post he shows the great service provided by both professionals and that he was happy to pay each professional a prorated rate of about $1,000 dollars per hour. Wow!  How do they make 1,000 per hour?  The answer is simple… tools and knowledge! The blog post shows that it is not abou Read More

We recently released SQL doctor 2.0, which now quickly prioritizes wait statistics and provides expert level advice for alleviating bottlenecks and other performance issues. To create the wait stat recommendations we worked closely with industry experts like SQL Server MVP and SQLAuthority.com founder, Pinal Dave, to help users analyze wait statistics and quickly improve server and application performance. Our own Read More

You may be inadvertently limiting the number of worker threads available to the SQL Server process.  This could be caused from the ‘max worker threads’ option being set to 255 after the upgrade of the SQL Server 2000 instance to a later version of SQL Server. On SQL Server 2000, the default setting for ‘max worker threads’ was 255.  When upgrading to a later version of SQL Server, this setting of Read More

I have spent a significant amount of time researching SQL Server wait stats on the web to find the best information currently available on the subject.  There are a myriad of resources on the web discussing wait stats and I quickly found out how time consuming it is to extract the diamonds from the rough.  Due to the amount of time I placed in researching this information, I thought it would be beneficial Read More

Earlier this week I was researching a performance issue on a SQL Server instance using the ‘sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks’ and ‘sys.dm_exec_requests’ DMV’s and noticed a ton of page latch and page io latch waits.  This is nothing unusual when dealing with performance issues and is normally just one of the signs of poorly written queries, missing indexes, poorly designed indexes, or out of data statistics. Read More

  At the 2010 SQL PASS Summit we had the great pleasure of speaking with the well known SQL Server MVP Pinal Dave (blog).  One of the topics that were discussed was the use of wait stats by SQL doctor for generating recommendations and he agreed to spend extra time with us to discuss his experience with wait stats and how they can be used by SQL doctor for performance tuning. Over the past two months we h Read More

Last week I explained how SQL doctor can export recommendations to an Excel spreadsheet.  I now want to cover how you can take that exported spreadsheet and import the data into a SQL Server table. There is a Microsoft Support article (321686) that shows how to import data into SQL Server from Excel.  This article covers the following techniques for importing the data: SQL Server Data Transformation Serv Read More

Earlier this week a colleague of mine frantically ran up to my desk asking if I had read the SQL Doctor review by ‘The Scary DBA’.  For some reason my initial reaction was to fall backwards out of my chair (almost falling out of the window and squashing the painter that happened to be outside painting the exterior window).  As I was being helped back up to my feet, my co-worker was reassuring me that Read More

One of the most requested features during the Beta of SQLdoctor was the ability to export the recommendation list.  Since this was such a popular request, I wanted to cover the steps required to successfully export the recommendation list to an Excel spreadsheet. Once a SQL Server instance has been successfully analyzed with SQLdoctor, open the ‘Recommendations’ tab as seen below: At this point you will Read More

The compatibility level of a database is set at database creation time based on the compatibility level of the ‘model’ database.  This is no surprise to anyone and obvious to almost everyone familiar with the creation of a database and the purpose of the ‘model’ database.  What is surprising (to me at least) is how often databases are moved to newer versions of SQL Server using either restore or a Read More