Find and fix SQL Server performance problems faster

THERE’S YOUR
PROBLEM
TROUBLESHOOTING SQL SERVER LIKE A PRO
Joey D’Antoni
20 August 2015

THERE’S YOUR PROBLEM
2© 2015 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

AGENDA
Performance
Wait Stats
Indexes, When and Where
Perfmon
Bringing This All Together
3
M AKI NG THI NG S FAS TE R
© 2015 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

FIRST THINGS FIRST
Dynamic Management Views are Your
Friends
SSMS GUI offers some insight, but not
nearly as much as queries and scripts
Consider using tools at scale
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G E T CO M FO RTABLE W I TH DM V S

PERFORMANCE TUNING SQL SERVER
DBAs get paid
to backup and
restore
databases
Performance
usually gets
second priority
due to uptime
Let’s about
some
techniques to
cut to the chase
5
LI KE A P RO

HOW I TUNE A SERVER
Check Server
Configuration
Read Error
Log
Look at Wait
Stats
Look in Plan
Cache
Tune Queries
6
M Y M E THO DO LO G Y

PERFORMANCE BOTTLENECKS
CPU
Disk
Memory
Network
Blocking/Locking
7
I S TO LE THI S FRO M TO M

UNDERSTANDING WAIT STATS
Whenever SQL Server is waiting on
something it records it
Knowing how to read wait stats is the
key to understanding performance
Paul Randal—Tell me where it hurts
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THE S E CRE TS TO S Q L P E RFO RM ANCE

WAIT STATS DEMO
9
LE T M E S E E HO W I T W O RKS

CXPACKET
Check
MaxDOP
Understand
Cost
Threshold for
Parallelism
Understand
your
workload
Dig into the
plan cache
It may be
natural
10
W HY AM I ALWAY S S E E I NG THI S

INDEXES

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
SET STATISTICS
IO ON
SET STATISTICS
TIME ON
WAIT STATS
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Q UE RY TUNI NG

WAIT STATS AND MISSING INDEXES
Large Logical Reads
PAGEIOLATCH_SH
Storage Latency
Can result in higher than usual CPU use
SP_WHOISACTIVE--Adam Machanic
13

OTHER PERFORMANCE TRICKS
Data Compression where appropriate
Columnstore for analytical workloads
Splitting workloads by disk device using
filegroups
Faster SAN/More RAM
14
M AKI NG DATA G O FAS TE R

DATA COMPRESSION
Reduces IOs needed
Incurs a CPU cost
Good for slower storage
Good for workloads with high scan
rate
Impact is mainly on update

DATABASE TUNING ADVISOR
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BE V E RY CARE FUL

IDENTIFYING WHICH QUERIES TO TUNE
17
DI G G I NG I N DE E P

Physical Query Tuning
18
D E M O

Execution Plans
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CAP TURI NG AND UNDE RS TANDI NG E X E CUTI O N
P LANS

POLL
Do You Know xQuery?
Have you worked with
xEvents?

CAPTURING EXECUTION PLANS
Profiler is marked as
deprecated
Extended Events ARE the
path forward
Profiler is still a lot easier to
use IMO
xEvents are more powerful
21
P RO FI LE R V S X E V E NTS

QUERY STORE
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S Q L S E RV E R 2 0 1 6

WINDOWS PERFORMANCE MONITOR
Powerful Tool for holistic view of
environment
Dedicated SQL Server counters
Can integrate with profiler traces
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AKA P E RFM O N

PERFMON COUNTERS
Memory
•Available Mbytes
SQL Server:Buffer Manager
•Lazy writes/sec
•Page life expectancy
•Page reads/sec
•Page writes/sec
SQL Server:MemoryManager
•Total Server Memory (KB)
•Target Server Memory (KB)
Processor
•%Processor Time
•%Privileged Time
Process (sqlservr.exe)
•%Processor Time
•%Privileged Time
Physical Disk
•Avg. Disk sec/Read
•Avg. Disk Bytes/Read
•Avg. Disk sec/Write
•Avg. Disk Bytes/Write
Paging File
•%Usage
SQL Server:Access Methods
•Forwarded Records/sec
•Full Scans/sec
•Index Searches/sec
System
•Processor Queue Length
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S Q L S E RV E R

PERFMON TIPS
Always run away of production server
Every 15 seconds is fine unless finding something
specific
Use BLG files—can use relog to go to another format
Include Perfmon

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RE S O LV E P E RFO RM ANCE I S S UE S Q UI CKLY
www.solarwinds.com/dpa-download/

THANK YOU
The SOLARWINDS and SOLARWINDS & Design marks are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC, are registered with the U.S.
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