Compress Big Tables
Storing data in SQL Server can be expensive. Not necessarily because disk is expensive; it isn’t and is generally getting cheaper all the time. Data costs money because it consumes RAM, requires CPU resources to…
Page Life Expectancy and Data Throughput
Page Life Expectancy, or PLE as it’s often referred to, is a measure of how frequently the average page of memory is evicted from the buffer pool. PLE is measured in seconds, and is the…
Memory Consumption by Object
SQL Server caches object data in memory in the buffer pool. Understanding memory consumption by object can be crucial for performance. For instance, you may have a large logging table consuming 90% of the buffer…
Slow inserts across a linked server?
Linked Servers offer a great way to connect two SQL Servers together, allowing remote querying and DML operations. Frequently, this is used to copy data from production to reporting. However, the temptation is to run…
Missing Stats DMV?
Useful statistics are critical for great performance in SQL Server. So much so, that by default, SQL Server creates statistics for columns it deems worthy without any help or interjection from anyone.1 However, SQL Server…
Query I/O over the Last Five Minutes
When faced with a SQL Server that is performing poorly, a great starting place for troubleshooting is looking at wait stats. Once you’re gathering wait stats, if you see lots of IO-related waits, you may…