Phil Factor demonstrates how to identify objects in a database that are not being used. The technique uses Extended Events to detect acquisition of Intent locks, and so determine which databases are active or apparently 'dormant', and then drills down to investigate on which tables data has been modified recently, and which views and stored procedures have been run. Read more
This article explains ten ways that SQL Monitor tackles the problem of scaling out the coverage of a single, lightweight monitoring system, and so allows your teams to maintain the health and performance of larger collections of databases and higher numbers of monitored SQL servers. Read more
Israel Valverde explains the triple benefits of extending SQL Monitor to cover your SQL Server instances running on Amazon RDS, in terms of SQL Server performance optimization, controlling AWS-hosting costs, and in having a single, unified view of the health of all your SQL Servers, regardless of where they are hosted. Read more
Jeremiah Peschka, a tech lead for SQL Monitor development, explains the new SQL Server configuration options available for the data repository, and how enabling them might improve SQL Monitor performance, when reading and writing monitoring data. Read more
SQL Monitor v11 introduces native support for SQL Server instances hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Relational Database Service (RDS) platform. In this post we'll explore the metrics you need to keep an eye on with Amazon RDS SQL Server monitoring, how a monitoring tool will help you manage the process of migrating databases to the Amazon cloud, as well as measures its success, and how SQL Monitor allows you to monitor all your SQL Server instances, wherever they are hosted, through a single pane of glass. Read more
Phil Factor explains how SQL Monitor helps focus performance tuning efforts on the tables and queries where 'rogue indexes' might be a significant problem, and then how to identify both 'missing' indexes that might be beneficial to the overall workload, and those that are unused or duplicated, and so are doing more harm than good. Read more
In this article, you'll learn how to detect and remove a common cause of SQL Server query performance problems: reliance on implicit datatype conversions. We'll use a combination of plan cache queries, extended events, and SQL Monitor. Read more
Phil Factor sets out with the modest aim of giving you enough of an introduction to waits to better understand the wait information you get from a SQL Server monitoring tool like SQL Monitor, and the rather overwhelming amount of information available in the underlying DMVs and Extended Events. Read more
Jamie Wallis explains how SQL Monitor can both reveal quickly who ran a deployment, and when, and automate the incident-response workflow to ensure it's dealt with swiftly. By extending such workflows to development and test servers, as well as production, the feedback cycle starts earlier, and you can stop problems from ever reaching the users. Read more
How well do the SQL Server licenses you own match up with what you need for your current use? William Durkin explains how to use SQL Monitor to find out. Read more