Well, the guess-days might be just about over for SQL Server DBA’s. People who revolutionized Oracle performance tuning several years ago, are now working at SQL Server revolution.

Look what Anjo Kolk had to say about at the interview during Miracle SQL Server Open World 2008:

And here is Cary Millsap from the same event:
Continue reading ‘SQL Server Performance Diagnostic — Still Guessing?’

Earlier this week I’ve attended RMOUG Training Days 2008 and one of the sessions was of particular interest. Mogens initiated very heated discussion about performance tuning methods that are currently in use and how inappropriate they all are because they still leave some chance for guesswork. No doubts that performance optimization has involved significantly in the recent years but there is still place for a lot of improvements. Thanks Mogens — you are invaluable BAAG supporter!

Daniel Fink was one of the presenters during that session and has done an interesting follow up. You probably know that couple month ago Dan expressed controversial idea that Oracle “wait interface is nearly useless”. My interpretation is that while wait interface removed a great deal of guesswork from performance troubleshooting, there is still a lot of times when analysts tend to rely on guesswork or don’t have other ways to go forward except educational guessing.

Now back to Dan’s most recent post — How useful are diagnostic/optimization tools?. I can’t agree more about incompleteness of performance tuning tools but can they ever be complete?
Continue reading ‘Can a Performance Tuning Tool be Complete?’