Category Archives: Best practices

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