SQL Server - PASS

PASS 2005: Session notes/comments Part 3

Tara Duggan — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 22:49:00 GMT

Once again, I attended 3 sessions today (Friday): Kevin Kline's "Performance Baselining, Benchmarking, and Monitoring", Tom Davidson's "SQL Server 2005: Dynamic Management Views", and Ross LoForte's "Optimization Considerations for Designing Very Large SQL Server Database Systems".

Kevin is a great speaker. He went into detail on how to do proactive monitoring. You start with a baseline, which is what is normal for the server. It includes number of concurrent users, Performance Monitor counter averages, system processes, and much more. He also showed us some exception monitoring, which is exceptions to the baseline. It uses limited performance monitoring, more alerts, and heavy use of the error logs.

I was in the presence of a SQL god during Kevin's session. Ken Henderson sat one seat in front and one seat to the right of me. I also was in the presence of someone with bad manners. The guy sitting two seats to the left of Ken put his nasty, bare feet on the seat in front of him. This is a professional conference, not a day at the beach. Show a little respect!

Tom showed us dynamic management views, also known as DMVs. Catalog views expose metadata persisted on disk, whereas DMVs expose changing server state information. They are used for diagnostics, memory and process tuning, and monitoring potentially across all sessions in that server. He mentioned that parallelism is good for OLAP systems but not for OLTP systems.

Ross noted that on systems with greater than 25% writes, RAID 10 is best and RAID 1 is next best. For systems that are primarily used for reads, such as data warehouses and reporting, RAID 5 is acceptable. He stated that RAID 10 should be used for the transaction log and for tempdb; the data drive can be either RAID 1, 5, or 10. He does not recommend using the autogrow feature on your databases if you have large databases. Instead, you should setup an alert to notify you when you are running out of space; then during a maintenance window, expand the file. I had to leave this session early so that I could catch my flight. I wish that I had been able to stay later as he was just getting into partitioning.

PASS 2005: My Experience

Tara Duggan — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 22:32:00 GMT

Wow, what a great experience!

Everyone here has been so friendly. It was nice to put faces to names even for people I didn't actually meet. I hope that I can attend another PASS conference some time in the near future and perhaps finally meet up with Nigel Rivett (I never did find him).

The only negative that I have about the conference is that some of the sessions weren't advanced enough even though I attended the ones in the 400 Series. Overall though, it was truly an amazing event. I certainly would recommend it to anyone who wants to go to a SQL Server conference.

PASS 2005: Session notes/comments Part 2

Tara Duggan — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 02:18:00 GMT

At the "General Session" today (Thursday), we saw a demo of the Upgrade Advisor tool which is used to prepare for the SQL Server 2005 upgrade. It'll show you what you need to change prior to the upgrade and what you can change after the upgrade. An example of something that you can change after the upgrade is the use of *= and =* for OUTER JOINs. This syntax has been deprecated in the 90 compatibility mode. Upgrade Advisor requires .NET Framework 2.0.

We also saw a demo of the reports available in Management Studio. I really like the schema change history report that you get to by clicking on your SQL Server in the Object Explorer then selecting Report from the summary tab. This will show you who has changed the schema and when it was done. The report feature uses Reporting Services.

In Alex Cheng's "Using SQL Execution Plans for Performance Optimizations in SQL Server 2005" session, I was surprised to see that SELECT * does not use a bookmark lookup in SQL Server 2005. I was also surprised to see in SQL Server 2005 that WHERE Column1 LIKE '%Value1%' uses an index seek instead of an index scan. Alex stressed that the estimated cost in an execution plan should be less than 1 for most queries on an OLTP system. I wish that Alex didn't spend so much time on the basics as he had a lot to cover and could have used that time to go into greater detail on the more advanced topics.

Ken Henderson covered three very useful tools that every DBA should consider using in his "SQL Server 2005 Diagnostic Collection and Analysis" session. These tools are SQLDiag, Relog, and ReadTrace. SQLDiag is a command line utility that is used to collect the data that you will need to diagnose a problem. It captures SQL Profiler trace data, Performance Monitor counters, blocking information, server configuration, Event logs, SQL Server Error Logs, and much more. It can be run as a console application or as a service. Previous versions could only run as a console application. You can customize what it collects via an ini or an XML (preferred) file. If you are using it as a service, you can also use the registry. It supports NTFS compression and has a built-in scheduling mechanism. It can collect data from multiple servers simulatenously since it can use multiple threads. It uses very little resources, except when it is collecting MS Info data (but you can turn this off). Relog utility converts a Performance Monitor log into any other format that Performance Monitor supports, such as SQL Server tables. If you convert to SQL, it will use an ODBC DSN for the connection. ReadTrace utility analyzes trace files. He had it analyze a 1GB trace file. It didn't take very long at all. It produces HTML reports with the analysis. He covered much more, but that is all I could scribble down.

In Chris Miller's "Network Security and Database Administration", he demonstrated the netsh.exe command line utility. It manipulates the Windows 2003 firewall settings. You can schedule batch files that call this utility to change firewall settings such as to open a port for access for a short time window. He also showed us how to use SQL Server 2000 with encryption. It requires EXACTLY correct setup. You can see KB276553 for how to set it up.

PASS 2005: Session notes/comments Part 1

Tara Duggan — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:22:00 GMT

On Tuesday, I attended Kimberly Tripp's "The Next Generation DBA: Critical New SQL Server Features NEED to Learn!" pre-conference seminar. It was awesome! She is a fantastic speaker. She covered database snapshots and database mirroring amongst many other DBA topics. I see my company using database snapshots so that developers can quickly query production data without querying the production database and also without having to copy the database to a development server. Even though log shipping still exists in SQL Server 2005, I think we'll be switching over to database mirroring to sync our disaster recovery site. Database mirroring won't be supported at RTM though.

On Wednesday, I attended three sessions: Kimberly Tripp's "Indexing Best Practices in SQL Server - Creation, Performance, Maintenance", Charles Felber's "Performance Trend Analysis Using SQL Trace", and Keith Elmore's "Fine Tuning Performance with Plan Guides".

The only negative to Kimberly's session was that it was only 75 minutes long. She said it normally takes two days to cover this material. She showed us how you can compare a Performance Monitor counter log with a SQL Profiler trace file on one screen in SQL Profiler. The counter log doesn't even have to be from the same server as the trace file; you just need to make sure that the times are synced on both servers. You can now see the execution plan graphically in SQL Profiler if you select the show plan in XML event. One thing that I found interesting was her tip to use UNION instead of OR in SQL Server 2000. In 2005, you won't see the performance improvement, but in 2000, you could see a drastic improvement. I'll have to try this one out when I get back home.

Charles' session showed us how to use SQL Trace, which is the alternative to SQL Profiler. SQL Trace is run via T-SQL commands, whereas SQL Profiler is a GUI tool. He demonstrated SQL Trace via his custom scripts. I'll be downloading them as soon as I get back. They are very well written. They are even formatted the way that I write T-SQL code.

Keith's session showed us the new plan guides feature. This is intended for scenarios where you have no control over the input SQL, such as third party applications. It is available in both Standard and Enterprise Editions. I don't currently support any third party applications, so I won't be able to use this feature, but it sounded useful.

PASS 2005: Exhibits, Swag, and SQLTeamers

Tara Duggan — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 23:13:00 GMT

During the "General Session" today (Wednesday), they threw out SQL Server 2005 t-shirts. Almost everyone got one. All of the t-shirts were black and had a verb on the back. Mine says "Replicate". I would have preferred "Analyze" or "Query" due to my disdain for replication. Maybe I'll be able to swindle someone into a trade.

I saw a demo of Red-Gate's SQL Log Rescue. For that, I got a free t-shirt. The product looks interesting enough that I'll probably download the free trial. We are already using SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare.

I also got a free t-shirt from HP, but they had to swipe my badge for that, which means marketing e-mails and phone calls are coming.

I met Mark Caldwell and Bill Graziano yesterday. I was on my way to the second part of Kimberly Tripp's "The Next Generation DBA: Critical New SQL Server Features NEED to Learn!" seminar, so we weren't able to chat. Bill and I talked for a few minutes today. He said that Nigel Rivett is here somewhere, but I haven't seen him yet. Hopefully I'll be able to chat with him as well as chat with Mark.