SQL Server 2008 Improvements Practicals – The Data Collector and the Management data Warehouse

I gave a presentation at TechEd 2008 where I covered our new features in "A Day in the Life of a DBA". Here's more of what I showed for 4:00pm - "Need for Speed":

Now it’s time to tune my systems. Before I can tune them, I need to track them. Sure, I can set up a bunch of Profiler Traces, queries against DMV’s, custom scripts and third-party products to set up a “baseline” DB on each system. But I don’t have to do that any more.

Now I just right-click the Data Collection system, create a central place to store data, and run a couple of wizards to start gathering all the data. And just what can I do with that? Well, based on a collection I’ve taken, I can walk through a problem capture, discovery, fix and source in just a few minutes.

In future posts I’ll detail how to do all this – but for now, it’s pretty cool to have that taken care of automatically.