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May 2nd, 2011:

Meme Monday – No, it’s not really the disk

Tom LaRock asked for 9 of your biggest non-disk problems for Meme Monday, so here we go:

1) Index Fragmentation
2) Memory over-consumption(stop running your apps on the SQL Server!!!!)
3) Run away queries
4) Network communication
5) ODBC/OLEDB drivers (Oracle, I’m looking at you)
6) Over-indexing (yeah, that table with 18 columns and 12 indexes….)
7) Lack of partitioning
8) Stale statistics
9) Locking (did you really have to use that exclusive table lock hint?????)

5 of these I’ve had to resolve in the last week. All of them within the last month. The good news is that most of these are pretty easy to identify and solve, but the bad news is most of these issues are the result of bad coding/querying practices and can be prevented with a little forethought. Which means I have more work to do with my developers…

Thanks for joining me on Meme Monday!

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Edit: After a brief discussion with Jeff Smith(b|t), I thought I should clarify the “Lack of Partitioning”.  I know most people use this to spread the I/O load against a data file, but I found it as a HUGE boost for performance because it allowed me to segment out my table into manageable parts for maintaining indexes and improving select performance.  Take a look at my partitioning post for more info.