Tara Kizer Blog

Tara Kizer

Refactoring for Performance

For the past few days, I've been working on a stored procedure that was the top offender for CPU usage. I tried various index changes, played around with index hints, etc. Read more →

PASS Summit 2011 – Part IV

This is the final blog for my PASS Summit 2011 series. Well okay, a mini-series, I guess. On the last day of the conference, I attended Keith Elmore’ and Boris Baryshnikov’s (both from Microsoft) “Introducing the Microsoft SQL Server Code Named “Denali” Performance Dashboard Reports, Jeremiah Peschka’s (blog|twitter) “Rewrite your T-SQL for Great Good! Read more →

PASS Summit 2011 – Part II

I arrived in Seattle last Monday afternoon to attend PASS Summit 2011. I had really wanted to attend Gail Shaw’s (blog|twitter) and Grant Fritchey’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar “All About Execution Plans” on Monday, but that would have meant flying out on Sunday which I couldn’t do. Read more →

Intermittent Copy/Paste Problem in RDP

If you use RDP to remotely connect to your servers, you've probably encountered a clipboard issue where copy/paste stops working. A quick Google search on the problem indicates you can easily fix the problem by logging out/logging back in or killing/restarting rdpclip. Read more →

Fixing SSMS Tabs

It never occurred to me that the way SSMS handles tabs could be changed, and it’s just that the default settings suck. In this blog post, Brent Ozar shows us how to fix SSMS so that the tabs are actually usable and not annoying anymore. Read more →

65536% Autogrowth!

Twice a year, we move our production systems to our disaster recovery site. Last Saturday night was one of those days. There are about 50 SQL Server databases to be moved to the DR site, which is done via database mirroring. Read more →

Presentation Ideas

I've been thinking about submitting my "Performance Tuning With Traces" topic for SQL Saturday #73, but I think I’m burnt out on that topic. I’ve only presented it twice (#55|#47), and I am passionate about that subject, however I need something new. Read more →

Performance Tuning with Traces

This past Saturday, I presented "Performance Tuning with Traces" at SQL Saturday #47 in Phoenix, Arizona. You can download my slide deck and supporting files here. This is the same presentation that I did in September at SQL Saturday #55 in San Diego, however I focused less on my custom server-side trace tool and more on the steps that I take to troubleshoot a production performance problem which often includes server-side tracing. Read more →

Missing Indexes DMV Report, 3 billion Impact!

We’ve been having some major performance issues with one of the applications that I support. The database is on SQL Server 2005 and is about 150GB in size. We’ve identified a couple of issues already on the database side. Read more →

SQL Saturday #47 in Phoenix

SQL Saturday is coming to Phoenix, Arizona on February 19th, 2011. I have submitted my session for this event. If my session gets approved, it’ll be the same presentation that I gave recently at SQL Saturday #55. Read more →

Database Growth Tracker Tool – New Version

A while back I wrote a CLR object to track database growth. The CLR object queries sp_databases for each passed in server and saves the data into a table. By using this CLR object, I can track all of my systems in one location. Read more →