Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

When I went to SQL Rally last week, I fully expected to be learning from many of the presenters there. The excitement about being immersed in all that awesomesauce is infectious. What I didn’t expect is that I would take my turn at teaching, handing out information like candy to twelve year olds. It was one of those times where I was talking shop with some other folks while we were all taking a session off. The group started chatting about performance tuning(something I geek out about) and I shared out some of the fundamental links, blogs, and tools I use when I get the inevitable “My query is slow!” call.

Now, just to be clear, none of the information I shared was “mine”. The beauty of the SQL Server community is that we have so much great talent and everyone is willing to help educate. What follows here is a list of my core tools and information links, resources that I use on almost a daily basis. I also see them as the start of a journey, because none of this is the last word on a particular subject. If you’re like me you’ll continue to browse the Google ‘verse with what you pick up here.

Brent Ozar:

• http://www.brentozar.com/sql/sql-server-performance-tuning/ – Check out the perfmon tutorial and the SQL Bits vids.
• http://www.brentozar.com/sql/blitz-minute-sql-server-takeovers/ – Blitz script is good for getting some basic info on a server you know little about.

Full disclosure, I’m a Brent Ozar fanboy. I started reading his blog about a year or so ago and he’s made me laugh and taught me a whole heck of a lot. It’s because of him that I started blogging and getting involved in the community.

Glenn Berry:

• http://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/april-version-of-sql-server-2008-diagnostic-queries/– These are awesome DMV queries that have a ton of info and I use on a daily basis. Take your time poking around with these, be careful with index frag stats, but the rest should be pretty safe to run.

Glenn Berry is a local Denver MVP and I see him from time to time at the Denver SQL User’s Group meetings. Not only has he provided these great DMV queries, but he really understands hardware and has some great posts on the nitty-gritty of your machines.

General Community Resources

• sqlserverpedia.com
• sqlservercentral.com

These two sites are invaluable resources for articles and tutorials on getting stuff done. When I was figuring out how to implement partitioning, I did a lot of reading on both of these sites.

Documents

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966413.aspx – Performance tuning waits and queues white paper from Microsoft. It says 2005, but a lot of the information is applicable to 2008 as well. If you’re wondering what a wait type is or means, check here.
• http://www.quest.com/documents/landing.aspx?id=11635&technology=34&prod=&prodfamily=&loc – Quest poster detailing out recommendations for performance monitor counters. Sits above my desk for whenever I start looking at counters. WARNING: You need to leave your email to get this one, so you’ll probably get a sales call.  Annoying, but the poster is worth it.

Both of these docs live on my laptop and are constantly getting referenced. My only complaint about the waits and queues white paper is that it’s a little stale and I hope Microsoft does an updated one for Denali when it’s released.

If you don’t have a cheat sheet with your go to resources, hopefully this list gives you a good start. Or you can add this to your currently existing list. I have found each one of these links invaluable to my day to day work, not only enriching my general knowledge but giving me the tools to troubleshoot many of the performance problems that come my way.