Have you ever wanted to try out SQL Server Availability Groups but never had enough spare tin lying around in order to setup an environment? Well the Azure portal has been updated and now you don’t need to have any physical kit lying around, nor do you need to worry about having a beefed up laptop..

This is a quick post about measuring query performance. How do you know that changes you’ve made to improve a query are actually beneficial? If all you’re doing is sitting there with a stop watch or watching the timer in the bottom right corner of SQL Server Management Studio then you’re doing it..

Analysing Index Usage

The first step I use in order to troubleshoot cube processing performance issues is index usage.

I was doing some database tuning recently and I found a missing index that I wanted to add. This is a reasonably straightforward thing to want to do, so I scripted it up and executed the command and went to grab a coffee.

I was working on a data warehousing project recently where I was working with VERY large data sets. It was a customer insight warehouse and as part of that warehouse details about customers were stored including their DOB.

It’s very easy to automate a report to check your index fragmentation levels on your databases. Here is a query that I use to check the fragmentation level before deciding whether or not to act on it.

When trying to create actions with SSAS I really struggled to find any information or easy “how to’s” to show me how they were done.

Just a quick post because I’ve written a script I’m quite proud of this afternoon to help find queries that need tuning.

Firstly for those that already know about this feature of Windows, have you enabled this permission to your SQL Server service account? If not why not? I’d be interested to know so please leave a comment below.