SQL doctor Development Blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

The performance of tempdb is often overlooked and sometimes even ignored.  Don’t make that critical mistake!  Without a properly configured tempdb, your SQL Server will be bottlenecked from the start. There is a misconception among some that tempdb performance only impacts queries if the query explicitly creates or uses temporary tables within tempdb.  This is [...]

SQL doctor can be used to identify the cause of deadlocks.  A deadlock is when a cyclic dependency occurs between two or more threads, processes, resources, etc.  This causes one of the processes to be declared the deadlock victim and killed so that the other process can continue.  To identify deadlocks and provide useful information [...]

As you may be able to tell from the schizophrenic title of this blog post, there is plenty of confusion around ‘Lock Pages in Memory’ and ‘Address Windowing Extensions’ for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. There are plenty of reasons why this subject is confusing and among those are the following: Changes between [...]

Improve SQL Server performance by avoiding an implicit conversion in a search predicate.

SQLdoctor does a great job in analyzing SQL Server missing index information to provide the best possible recommendations for adding new indexes.