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Category: SQL Performance

Performance Problems with SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition Under CAL Licensing

Numerous licensing changes were introduced in SQL Server 2012; the most significant was the move from socket-based licensing to core-based licensing for Enterprise Edition. One of the challenges that Microsoft faced with this change was providing a migration path for customers that previously used Server+CAL based licensing for Enterprise Edition prior to SQL Server 2012. Customers under Software Assurance can upgrade to SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition and still use Server+CAL licensing (also known as "grandfathering") but with a limitation to 20 logical processors, as documented in the SQL Server 2012 Licensing Guide.

  ◆  November 27, 2012
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Database smarter with deeper insights for Microsoft SQL
Quick Tip – Speed Up a Slow Restore from the Transaction Log

Here's a quick tip for you:

During some restore operations in SQL Server, the transaction log redo step might be taking an unusually long time. Depending somewhat on the version and edition of SQL Server you've installed, you may be able to increase performance by tinkering with the readahead performance for the redo operations. To do this, you should use the MAXTRANSFERSIZE parameter of the RESTORE statement. For example, if you set MAXTRANSFERSIZE = 1048576, it'll use 1MB buffers.

  ◆  November 14, 2012
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Ten Common Threats to Execution Plan Quality

The quality of an execution plan is highly dependent on the accuracy of the estimated number of rows output by each plan operator. If the estimated number of rows is significantly skewed from the actual number of rows, this can have a significant impact on the quality of a query's execution plan. Poor plan quality can be responsible for excessive I/O, inflated CPU, memory pressure, decreased throughput and reduced overall concurrency.

  ◆  November 13, 2012
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The Zombie PerfMon Counters That Never Die!

One of the things that's simultaneously great and horrible about the Internet is that, once something gets posted out in the ether, it basically never goes away. (Some day, politicians will realize this. We can easily fact check their consistency.) Because of longevity of content posted to the Internet, a lot of performance tuning topics become "zombies." We shoot 'em dead, but they keep coming back!

  ◆  October 17, 2012
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Configuring a Dedicated Network for Availability Group Communication

SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups require a database mirroring endpoint for each SQL Server instance that will be hosting an availability group replica and/or database mirroring session. This SQL Server instance endpoint is then shared by one or more availability group replicas and/or database mirroring sessions and is the mechanism for communication between the primary replica and the associated secondary replicas.

Depending on the data modification workloads on the primary replica, the availability group messaging throughput requirements can be non-trivial. This activity is also sensitive to traffic from concurrent non-availability group activity. If throughput is suffering due to degraded bandwidth and concurrent traffic, you may consider isolating the availability group traffic to its own dedicated network adapter for each SQL Server instance hosting an availability replica. This post will describe this process and also briefly describe what you might expect to see in a degraded throughput scenario.

  ◆  October 11, 2012
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