Implicit Conversions Can Be An Unseen Danger

I got an email from one of my developers regarding a process they had developed in-house. The process has been taking longer and longer to run and it had reached the point where the application was timing out while waiting for a response from the database. Some investigating revealed that the process was timing out […]

Changing SQL Server’s MaxDOP Setting

Last week, I wrote about what MaxDOP is and why you may not want to leave it at the default value of zero on your multi-processor systems. This week I’m going to talk about how to change it and give some results from my server where I made a change. MaxDOP is an advanced configuration […]

Setting MaxDOP on Multi-Core / Processor Servers

In my job, I don’t have many servers with more than 8 processor cores, so I typically don’t set the server-wide MaxDOP setting and instead let it stay at the default of zero, which tells SQL Server to use however many processors it thinks a query should use. However, I do have a handful of […]

Performance Counters for Virtual Machines

I’ve written in the past about the need to create a baseline of your SQL Server’s performance and how to do that. The list of Perfmon counters I used was from a list that Brent Ozar recommended in one of this videos. I saw something last week that made me add a couple. Paul Randal […]