Tag Archives: sqlpass

SQLSat#324 – Session Noms

Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions at SQL Satruday #324 in Baton Rouge. This was really a awesome event – thanks also to all the people that helped put it on and all the sponsors who helped make it happen.

I had a great time presenting and I think my demos went ok (for the first time ever doing demos). I also really appreciate the feedback since I want to keep on presenting. If you were in one of the sessions and have any further comments or questions feel free to leave a comment here and I will get back to you.

Also, I have gotten the scripts posted here and the download appears to be working now. Let me know if you have any questions about those. Enter the password below to access and download the scripts from Beginning Automation with Powershell.

Thanks again and see everyone next year!

SQL Saturday #324 – I’m headed South!

It is just a few more days until SQL Saturday #324 – Baton Rouge. I will be giving two sessions there – Making the Leap from Developer to DBA and Beginning Automation with Powershell. So looking forward to this event!

The last time I was in southern Louisiana I was barely in my 20’s and on a family vacation. I found that my normal routine for straightening my natural curls was no match for the level of humidity in New Orleans. This memory prompted me to check the weather for this weekend – yeah…this could get interesting.

See everyone there! 🙂

I’m Speaking – SQL Saturday #308

SQLSAT308_SPEAKING

This weekend will be my second time to speak at a SQL Saturday event, and the first time I will be doing it solo. Being a native Texan, I have to admit it is a little strange that I have never been to Houston before, but I cannot think of a more fitting reason to make the drive down there. There is also that whole Dallas vs. Houston thing….but that is an unrelated post that I think other sites have already covered ad nauseam.

My session this weekend will be on Making the Leap from Developer to DBA – a topic I am all too familiar with since I have lived it. Fulfillment of that desire to innovate and create things can be accomplished as a DBA, but that is only a small part of the role. The business depends on you to make sure data is accurate and available in a timely fashion. Developers depend on you for the same thing but also for things like deploying their code…and trying to prevent them from hanging themselves and you when you do it.

It is still not too late to sign up for the event. If you are in Texas or anywhere near Houston you should go…and come to my session. Hope to see you there. 🙂

Back from SQL Summit

Quick post – I am back at work this week from the SQL PASS Summit and I have to say I think it was the best conference I have ever been to. From the sessions to the people and the events, everything was crazy fun. I now see what people mean by #sqlfamily. Even though it was my first time, everyone was so welcoming that it didn’t feel that way. I am looking forward to more of the same next year in Seattle. Coming up soon is SQL Saturday #255 – Dallas (well, actually, it is in Arlington…hmmm) and then SQL Saturday #233 – Washington DC. Heck, I might even make it to the after events this time. If you want to connect with me at either of these events hit me up on twitter – @texasamy.

Optimizing SQL Server Performance in a Virtual Environment with Denny Cherry

T-SQL performance tuning – no differences between virtual and physical

Check host and GPU numbers – look outside of the VM at the host.

Remote Perfmon users – group you can be added to for viewing performance monitor information for the server; you can be added to this group on the server where your VM is hosted.

ESX Top – task manager for UNIX; command line utility. Check for CPU thrashing – looking for percent used.

Check host and guest for disk IO latency.

Balloon memory driver – should be enabled; used by host os to request memory back from the guest os; if this is turned off – prevents host os from paging physical memory to the hosts swap file; paging will occur and you will have random slowness that will be difficult to diagnose.

Reserved memory setting – How much memory you want and how much memory you really need to have (reserved).

Memory deduplication – looking for and stripping out duplicate instances of processes in memory; great for OS memory. Doesn’t work for all SQL Server – unless multiple SQL Servers have the same pages in cache.

Storage configuration options – IO is the same if the disks are physical or virtual; automatic tier adjusting technology if possible. Storage slow? Get faster storage ($$$). Keep OS, data, logs tempdb on separate disks if possible.

Storage deduplication – can greatly improve overall performance; deduplicating the OS virtual disks = save much less data to the array.

VMWare Paravirtualization Driver – optional driver for vSphere Virtual Machines; recommended for high IO workloads; config via VM Properties – select SCSI controller, change type.

Monitoring – look at more levels of the environment; SQL Server, guest OS, hypervisor, etc.

Counters –
reads/writes per sec – correlated counter at the host level
seconds / reads and writes
disk queue
page life expectancy
system processor queue
VM Disk
VM Memory

Timer inside the VM lies – ugly rumor and nothing more.