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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.  [...]

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, [...]

In my previous blog post ‘Parallelism: Hurry up and wait’ I discussed how parallel queries cause CXPACKET waits.  I also covered the common causes for these waits to be high on an OLTP server.  Today I want to finish up my thoughts on the subject and hopefully round out the discussion for both OLTP and [...]

  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 [...]

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 [...]