User_Updates value from sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats can be misleading

I was doing some investigating the other day and trying to find which tables in our environment were the most written to. This was because my buddies in the IT department had gotten a bunch of new storage that was optimized for a write-intensive workload. To identify which tables had the most writes, I used […]

Performance Tuning A Query – An Example

I don’t spend a lot of my time tuning queries. Many of the databases in my company are used by third party products and we have limited control over the changes we can make to those. However, we do have several databases that are used by home-grown applications and these we have much more latitude […]

Indexing The Lottery

In this post, I walk through the steps of basic index analysis and, although we end up with a fairly obvious solution, we discover that optimizing SQL Server performance sometimes doesn’t even involve SQL Server. One of the occupation hazards, if you will, of being a DBA, is that you tend to think about possible […]