Category Archives: Performance

Powershell disk inventory

Every now and then, I have to tackle a performance problem on a SQL Server I’ve never seen before. One of the things I’ll be looking for is the block size of the disks. The block size for drives containing … Continue reading

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Two wrongs make a right: tricking the query optimizer

Sometimes, the query optimizer makes mistakes. Instead of selecting the most optimal plan, a sub-optimal plan is chosen, and it is your task as a DBA to help SQL choose the right plan. In this case, the optimizer overestimated the … Continue reading

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Finding the application timeout

The problem Last week, an application started reporting SQL timeouts. By default, SQL does not have a query timeout; it is the application that decides it doesn’t want to wait any longer. The question was: how do we find out … Continue reading

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