Open Source

Last week I introduced WorkloadTools and promised additional posts to describe what it can do in more detail. So, here we go: in this post I will show you how to use WorkloadTools to capture a workload and analyze it, in order to find things like the most resource-intensive queries or discover how the application behaves over time. Capturing the workload First of all, you need to capture the workload using SqlWorkload. [Read More]

If you ever tried to capture a benchmark on your SQL Server, you probably know that it is a complex operation. Not an impossible task, but definitely something that needs to be planned, timed and studied very thoroughly. The main idea is that you capture a workload from production, you extract some performance information, then you replay the same workload to one or more environments that you want to put to test, while capturing the same performance information. [Read More]

Three years ago, I started to work on a project called ExtendedTsqlCollector. I blogged about it multiple times here on spaghettidba.com. Even if I received positive feedback, I knew that one aspect was slowing down the adoption of the project: the Data Collector. That particular feature of SQL Server has a very bad reputation for being difficult to set up, customize and monitor. ExtendedTSQLCollector tried to address some of those issues, but the damage was already done and I knew that the Data Collector was already on the verge of extinction. [Read More]