Monthly Archives: August 2018

MAXDOP Calculator

Every time I conduct a SQL Server health check, it’s pretty common for me to find wrong configurations at instance level. But one of the most common mistakes I see on the wild, is SQL instances having the “max degree of parallelism” (MAXDOP) set to “1” (single core) , probably this behavior is related to a misconception of how parallelism works or because some DBAs thinks this parameter reduces the “CXPACKET” wait types, who knows …

In order configure MAXDOP properly, DBA’s should read and understand what Microsoft’s has as best practice guideline in the KB# 2806535. This article has a table with the explanation on how to calculate the right value for this configuration: Continue reading

Guatemala SQL Server local group

Good news for all the Guatemalan data professionals, starting from August 2018 you have an official PASS SQL Server local group near to you!

What is PASS?

First thing first, for all those future members of this local group I will like to explain what is the PASS organization all about.
PASS is the world’s largest community for Microsoft Data Platform users to connect, share and learn with fellow data professionals. Join PASS today for free. it is s a not-for-profit organization run by and for the community that supports data professionals throughout the world who use the Microsoft data platform.

Why a SQL Server group in Guatemala?

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Cleaning up Query Store data after database restore

Query Store is a very powerful tool for performance tuning, if you are not using it already you should!! It will save you a lot of time and effort because it makes the performance troubleshooting easy for DBA’s. It helps you to quickly find performance differences caused by query plan change or a query regression after an upgrade.

One of the caveats of using this tool is that uses space from the PRIMARY file group when enabled, that means if the database is restored to another environment the Query Store data will be restored as well making your database restored version a little bit bigger and containing information that is probably not relevant for a development environment (unless you are doing a troubleshooting). Continue reading