Performance

SQL Server Performance Audit

Is a Slow SQL Server killing your team’s productivity? Ramp it into overdrive with a Performance Audit by sqlity.net… It’s like steroids for your SQL Server…

Wouldn’t it be great if your IT team could get more done in less time?

What if your server hummed along spitting out reports on time and no one sat around waiting? Would that mean more productivity? Would it mean everyone in the company had the information they need to make decisions—at least from IT?

Better planning + more productivity = increased bottom line.

If you have:

• Sluggish web pages
• Long running reports
• Missing indexes
• Blocked queries

Your company is losing money—ouch!

At sqlity.net, we conduct a SQL Server Performance Audit to help your SQL Server zoom past the competition

Although you can’t give your slow SQL Server steroids to make it go faster, you can do the next best thing: Hire the team at sqlity.net.

Here’s How It Works:

We connect to your server and watch it for analysis, performance and metrics.

Over the course of a few days we monitor how different parts of the system behave in different situations and on different days of the week.

Here’s why this is important: Your application encounters different load patterns throughout the week. If we watch only on Monday, we might miss a problem that happens only on Tuesdays. One client had a problem that appeared only on Fridays between 2:00-3:00 p.m. It slowed their SQL Server down so much, it could not even accept additional connections. But there was no discernable increase in traffic during those times. After doing some digging, it turned it out to be a complex interaction between function calls, parallelism and context switches. We were able to straighten it out so the Friday afternoons zipped by again – that is, SQL Server zipped—we can’t vouch for the staff.

During the SQL Server Performance Audit we look at different performance metrics including:

• Statement statistics based on SQL server plan cache – so we can see which procedure has the biggest problem.
• Wait statistics – we can see general problem areas like processor overload or an undersized IO subsystem
• Windows performance counters

We’ll hunt down those productivity killers and put them on the blacklist. Usually, there is more than one problem. Sometimes there are slow stored procedures; sometimes an index needs to be added. When these aren’t tuned accurately, your server can slow to a crawl. We’ll compile everything into a report for you, which includes a prioritized action item list.

And don’t worry about our work slowing you or your servers down. We use non-intrusive techniques that won’t impact the performance of your already strained SQL Server further. Your team will be able to do their jobs and our work won’t interfere.

The SQL Server Performance Audit Includes:

• Stored procedures – what’s the biggest problem child?
• Missing indexes – these can slow your server to a snail’s pace.
• Analysis of your system size – is your system big enough to handle the load?
• Blocking – one process is holding onto a resource and preventing another from moving ahead. Resource hugging can cause other processes to wait around twiddling their thumbs – this is costs you time and productivity.
• Deadlocking – When procedures fight over resources one has to go away. It’s like breaking up a bar fight and the SQL police has to get involved. When that happens, deadlocking shows up as an error.
  Deadlocks are often caused by underlying performance problems. For example, a procedure might be holding on too long to one resource before trying to access another one. Improve the performance and the deadlocks will go away too.

You’ll Get a Blueprint for Fixing the Problem(s):

The prioritized action item list will let you know where to get started right away. Often, fixing the single biggest “offender” can relieve the performance situation for the entire system. The recommendations might include steps to:

• Reduce the IO impact of a stored procedure by adding missing indexes or rewriting some of the involved statements.
• Changing the order in which tables are accessed to reduce the probability of dead locks.
• Reducing the time during which resources are locked to alleviate blocking problems
• Altering T-SQL statements to reduce CPU pressure or boost parallelism.

Each of these is different, but all have a direct financial impact. They can mean lost revenue because of reduced productivity, customer loss, or even penalties if you cannot meet your SLAs.

How Can a Slow Server Cost You in Penalties and Customers?

While working with several large installations in the healthcare field, we encountered one where 11 million customer records needed to be transferred to a new system. Dealing with sensitive healthcare records adds its own level of complexity due to HIPAA and PHI regulations but in this case there was the additional requirement for this transfer to take place within 72 hours of run time.

Do you know what our initial investigation revealed? That it was going to take over 70 YEARS to transfer the data! No way they would have been able to meet their SLAs.

Obviously, that’s unworkable by anyone’s standards.

Our goal? Fix the code so it would run faster and get the runtime down to hours. We did it. We were able to meet the imposed maximum runtime requirement.

If you’re ready to enjoy a blazing fast SQL server, let’s talk. Your performance audit will uncover the problems around a slow SQL Server and get it running fast so you look like a hero. Maybe you’ll even get a bonus!

Contact us today and let’s get you one step closer to saving the day. No steroids needed.

"My company contracted with sqlity.net to help us tackle our SQL Server performance issues. We came to rely on his vast knowledge of SQL Server and ability to track down even the stickiest problems. He also built some very complex monitoring and analysis tools to help us identify and correct sub-optimized queries. With their help we were able to significantly decrease the load on our cpu while growing in volume and application complexity."

Alan Freedman at JustAnswer