Understanding PostgreSQL’s Cache Hit Ratio

This article explores PostgreSQL's buffer cache hit ratio (BCHR), a metric tracked by Redgate Monitor to help you assess the health and performance of your databases. By correctly interpreting this ratio and using it with other relevant memory and IO metrics, you can identify potential bottlenecks in query execution before they impact users. Read more

Better Database Incident Management with Redgate Monitor

This article demonstrates how Redgate Monitor helps teams manage database incidents efficiently, by providing the right data to the right people, at each stage of a tiered incident response system. With fewer distractions from routine issues, specialist staff can focus on core tasks while teams resolve problems faster and prevent future disruptions. Read more

Current Activity for PostgreSQL in Redgate Monitor

Current Activity for PostgreSQL in Redgate Monitor provides a real-time view of queries currently running on your PostgreSQL instances. It will allow you to identify quickly any queries that are currently causing blocking and resource contention issues on an instance. Read more

Troubleshooting SQL Server Queries using Actual Execution Plans

For SQL Server 2019 onwards, Redgate Monitor can now show the actual execution plan, complete with runtime statistics, for expensive queries that were running over any period of investigation. This means you'll not only know how SQL Server executed your poorly performing query but also see accurate runtime data. Any big discrepancies between estimated and actual row counts will be revealed, and Redgate Monitor will highlight any warnings and offer recommendations. Read more

Database Monitoring for Developers

Database monitoring is an essential part of database development and testing because it will reveal problems early and allow you to drill down to the root cause, as well as look for any worrying trends in behavior of the database, when under load. If you are delaying doing this until a database is in production, you're doing it wrong. Read more

Six Things to Monitor with PostgreSQL

This article describes six performance metrics that ought to be central to your PostgreSQL monitoring strategy. By using a tool like Redgate Monitor to track these metrics over time, and establish baselines for them, you'll be able to spot resource pressure or performance issues immediately, quickly diagnose the cause, and prevent them becoming problems that affect users. Read more

Finding and Tuning Expensive Stored Procedures using Redgate Monitor

Redgate Monitor's Top procedures list makes it simple to find the procedures having the biggest impact on performance, allowing you to prioritize your tuning efforts, reduce risk and keep pace with the requirements of your growing database estate. Read more

Monitoring Azure SQL Database with SQL Monitor

Grant Fritchey explains the Azure-tailored metrics and alerts that you need to diagnose performance problems with your Azure SQL Databases, and let you know which resource (CPU, data IO or log IO) is the bottleneck. Read more

Tracking Queries in Redgate SQL Monitor

SQL Monitor v12.1.28 has added functionality to track queries. This blog post will outline what this does and how it works. What is a tracked query? Tracked queries is a new feature on the Server Overview page for SQL Monitor. It was added in preview in SQL Monitor v12.1.28. This feature allows you to mark Read more

Top Query Search in SQL Monitor

SQL Monitor v12.0 has added a new Query Text Search feature to allow users to search the text of the most expensive queries that executed on a SQL Server instance over a period. Here's what it does, and how it works. Read more

Why is my SQL Server Query Suddenly Slow?

A SQL Server query is suddenly running slowly, for no obvious reason. Grant Fritchey shares a 5-point plan to help you track down the cause and fix the problem. Read more

Is Tempdb Causing a Bottleneck?

One of your SQL Server instance shows a major dip in performance or throughput, affecting all the user databases. You notice that the slow interludes coincide, as if orchestrated. On investigation, it appears that several transactions running over that period were using a lot of space in tempdb. However, which of them, if any, are causing the tempdb bottleneck, and why? Read more

When SQL Server Performance Goes Bad: Rogue Indexes

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

When SQL Server Performance Goes Bad: Implicit Conversions

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

Introduction to Analyzing Waits using SQL Monitor

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

Automate Responses to Bad Deployments with Redgate Monitor

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

When SQL Server Performance goes Bad: the Fill Factor and Excessive Fragmentation

Phil Factor on the fill factor, pages splits and index fragmentation, and how SQL Monitor can help you decide if a custom fill factor for certain indexes might help alleviate performance issues. Read more

Monitoring TempDB Contention using Extended Events and SQL Monitor

When the tempdb database is heavily used, processes in any database on the instance will be forced to wait, due to contention as the SQL Server engine tries to manage allocation pages in tempdb. Phil Factor shows how to monitor for signs of trouble. Read more

Tracking the number of active sessions on a database using SQL Monitor

Phil Factor creates a simple custom metric to track the number of sessions that have recently done a read or write on a database. Having established a baseline for the metric, you'll be able to spot, and investigate the cause of, any wild deviations from normal behavior. Read more

Monitoring SQL Server Performance: What’s Required?

A monitoring tool must provide us with an understanding of the often-complex performance patterns that databases exhibit when under load, so that we can predict how they will cope with expansion or increase in scale. It must also helps us spot the symptoms of stress and act before they become problems that affect the service, and understand better what was happening within a database when an intermittent problem started. Read more

Monitoring the Application with SQL Monitor: Website Activity

Using a PowerShell script that collects log data from a web server, plus a SQL Monitor custom metric, Phil Factor offers a way to check for suspicious website errors and unusual patterns of activity, right alongside your database monitoring. Read more

The Changing Role of SQL Server Monitoring

Grant Fritchey explains how a modern monitoring tool must adapt, as our SQL Server databases grow in number and size, and migrate onto new cloud-based, containerized or virtual machine-based SQL Servers. Read more

Troubleshooting Blocking in SQL Server using SQL Monitor

SQL Monitor tells us immediately when significant blocking occurs, and where, during busy periods, and provides the full blocking chain, in an easy-to-digest graphical format, so we can diagnose and resolve the blocking quickly. Read more

Custom Metrics for Detecting Problems with Ad-hoc Queries

Overuse of ad-hoc queries by applications is a common source of SQL Server performance problems. The symptoms include high CPU and memory pressure. Phil Factor offers a simple custom metric to monitor the percentage of ad-hoc queries being executed on a database, and shows how SQL Monitor can detect when the problem is happening, and show you the queries that are affecting the server. Read more

Using SQL Monitor to Detect Problems on Databases that use Snapshot-based Transaction Isolation

Use of the read committed snapshot isolation level is often an effective way to alleviate blocking problems in SQL Server, without needing to rewrite the application. However, it can sometimes lead to tempdb contention. This article offers a small-scale solution (not suitable for use on large tables) to detect cases when tempdb contention is related to use of RCSI. Read more

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Deadlocks with Redgate Monitor

This article explains what SQL Server deadlocks are, why they occur, why they require immediate investigation, and the diagnostic data required to troubleshoot them. It then demonstrates an "Update Order" deadlock condition and shows how to find the cause quickly, in Redgate Monitor, using the Extended Events deadlock graph provided by the deadlock alert. Read more

Investigating problems with ad-hoc queries using SQL Monitor

Phil Factor demonstrates the performance problems that overuse of ad-hoc queries can cause and then how SQL Monitor can warn us when they are the cause of these problems on your SQL Servers, using built-in metrics such as SQL Compilations/sec metric and Batch Requests/sec. Read more

How to monitor the impact of patching on SQL Server performance

This article uses the Spectre/Meltdown bugs as means to demonstrate how you can use a tool like SQL Monitor to assess the impact of patching on the throughput and performance of your SQL Servers. Read more

SQL Monitor Quick Tip: Using the SQL static code analysis performance rules

This quick tip illustrates SQL Monitor's built-in set of Performance Rules for static code analysis. These rules are designed to highlight SQL syntax that could potential cause performance problems, and so indicate ways to improve the overall quality and performance of the workload, over time. Read more

Unearthing Bad Deployments with SQL Monitor and Redgate’s Database DevOps Tools

Sudden performance issues in SQL Server can have many causes, ranging all the way from malfunctioning hardware, through to simple misconfiguration, or perhaps just end users doing things they shouldn't. But one particularly common culprit is when deployments go wrong: I don't know a single DBA who hasn't been burned by a bad release. Read more

Troubleshooting a painful query using execution plans in SQL Monitor

How to use SQL Monitor to identify an unusual set of behaviors on the server, then narrow down the cause of the behaviors to a particular query. Within that query we have the starting point for tuning the query to get better performance. Read more

How to accelerate your SQL Server performance using SQL Monitor

I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time as a racing driver, racing BMWs for three years before joining the BRSCC Porsche Championship. Steve McQueen famously said ‘Racing is life. Anything before or after is just waiting’. When I’m waiting, I’m a SQL Server DBA consultant and throughout my racing and DBA career, I’ve realised Read more