posted on Friday, March 25, 2005 8:54 PM
by
thomasswilliams
(Belated) Review of Melbourne SQL Server SIG for March 2005
March's Melbourne SQL Server SIG was presented by Greg Linwood, on “Performance Tuning Methodology - SQL Server 2000/2005” (event details can be seen here). The topic was obviously pretty relevant because the room was packed. The slides from Greg's presentation are available from http://www.sqlserver.org.au/resources/ViewResource.aspx?resourceId=33.
Greg started by defining “methodology” as a repeatable process, and explained that “performance tuning” had a different meaning for DBAs and developers - he mentioned that DBAs are concerned that the server runs well, while developers are interested in their procedures running fast (since I'm a developer, I see nothing wrong with this!)
Greg then went through some of the “tools of the trade”. I can honestly say I'd never seen some of the stuff he did: Profiler traces via script using functions like ::fn_trace_getinfo, and checking how much of SQL Server's buffer pool is used for data vs. compiled stored procedures, were two things in particular that I haven't come across in my travels.
Greg led the session well and clearly knew his stuff when it came to tuning SQL Server performance. Apart from touching on the tools useful for performance tuning, he also spoke about the ideas behind benchmarking and acting on feedback from users, which was really helpful to me. After he finished speaking he opened the floor up for a Q&A session with two SQL Server gurus* Geoff and David, who acted as the panel of experts and fielded questions. In hearing a couple of questions that had been submitted via e-mail, I was amazed at what people go through to meet business requirements and the way the experts handle shortcomings in the product, as demonstrated by Geoff and David's answers.
Well done Greg for a thorough description of the top tools to use. I spoke to Greg and he'd given his session at the Canberra SIG earlier in the week, so I reckon it's a topic near and dear to the hearts of people that work with SQL Server. And it was good to see so many people at the Melbourne event (I was on the door doing a bad job handing out name tags).
* In Australia, our word for “guru” is “bloody legend”