Explore professional strategies for managing SQL Server Plan Regression. This guide offers insight into preventing performance degradation through efficient execution plan selection and maintenance, ensuring optimal query performance in SQL Server environments.
Month: March 2024
Preventing Page Splits with Optimal Fill Factor Settings
The SQL Server Fill Factor is a setting that can be applied to indexes, which determines the amount of space to leave empty within the index pages. This setting is crucial for managing how densely SQL Server stores the index data on each page. It’s primarily used to improve performance and reduce page splits during insert or update operations that modify the index. The Fill Factor is specified as a percentage value.
Migrating SQL Server On-Prem Workloads to Azure Virtual Machines
Migrating from an on-premises SQL Server to an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) encompasses not just a technological shift but also a strategic transformation that demands foresighted planning and preparation. This refined approach focuses on the preliminary steps necessary to ensure not just a seamless transition but also an optimized post-migration environment. Emphasizing benchmarking your current infrastructure and tailoring capacity planning to the specific types of workloads being migrated, this guide aims to lay a solid foundation for your move to Azure.
Enhancing Data Durability with SQL Server’s REQUIRED SYNCHRONIZED SECONDARIES TO COMMIT Feature
SQL Server 2017 marked a significant advancement in high availability architectures by introducing the REQUIRED_SYNCHRONIZED_SECONDARIES_TO_COMMIT setting. This feature enhances data protection and integrity within Availability Groups (AGs) by meticulously controlling the transaction commit process across replicas. Its role has continued to be pivotal in subsequent releases, including SQL Server 2022, showcasing Microsoft’s commitment to robust data protection mechanisms.
SQL Server Stress Testing: A Step-by-Step Guide Using ostress
Today we will explore a practical approach to enhancing the performance of your SQL Server instances using ostress. This tool, part of the RML Utilities for SQL Server, is a game-changer for database administrators and developers looking to simulate heavy workloads and ensure their databases can handle the pressures of real-world applications. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the essentials of downloading RML Utilities, setting up your test environment, and leveraging ostress for performance testing.
SQL Server Performance Tuning: Dealing with Last Page Contention
Last Page Insert Contention, commonly referred to as “last page contention,” is a specific type of contention in SQL Server related to the last page of an index, typically a clustered index. This happens because SQL Server uses a mechanism where multiple sessions try to insert records on the last page of an index, leading to contention.
Understanding and Diagnosing SQL Server Wait Types
In SQL Server, wait types are important indicators of where and why delays occur during query execution, directly impacting database performance. Properly understanding and diagnosing these wait types enable database administrators to pinpoint specific performance bottlenecks. This blog post aims to provide an overview of essential wait types that demand attention, distinguish common wait types that can usually be ignored, and offer strategies for effective diagnosis and interpretation to enhance overall database performance.
Ensuring Continuous Data Capture in SQL Server Across Failovers
Discover how to configure Change Data Capture (CDC) in SQL Server to be High Availability (HADR) aware. This guide covers step-by-step instructions to ensure continuous data capture and system resilience across failovers, minimizing manual intervention and maximizing uptime.
Automating Data Insertion into SQL Server with PowerShell
PowerShell is a powerful scripting language that can automate a wide range of tasks, including database operations. In this post, we’ll demonstrate how to create a DataTable in PowerShell, populate it with random data, and then save that data into a table in SQL Server using SqlBulkCopy. We will first look at what is required for this task and then we’ll script it out.