In our internal discussion forum for SQL Server, somebody asked this question. Here is the answer (Thanks G2) Temporary tables & table variables differ in semantics, capability and query performance. Which one is appropriate for you will depend...

Ever wanted to see data visually in excel without going through the complex wizard? Juice analysis has posted one of the neatest hacks to get graphical representation of data. The hack uses simple function REPT. Microsoft Excel 12 has similar functionality...

Maoni has written a good insight on process to identify performance issues. I’ve seen enough people who looked really hard at some performance counters (often not correct ones) or some other data and asked tons of questions such as “is this allocation...

While doing memory analysis on one of my scenarios, I noticed that System.Collections.BitArray.BitArrayEnumeratorSimple::get_Current Object () is doing lot of allocations of System.Boolean object. I wrote a simple program to reproduce the behavior...

SQL Server team has done some great amount of work in SQL Server 2005 to make the performance analysis of server easy. I am going to post a series of code snippets which I find useful in my day to day work. Memory Analysis Let us assume we have...

One of the biggest pain points for SQL Server 2000 was for looking at the plan of a SQL Statement, you have to execute the same. As per my understanding SQL Server 2000 did not expose any mechanism for this. So the only way to look at the plan of the...

Ever got lost in reading the call stack trace from .NET profiler? I do in the recursive calls to functions. Other times I just want to get a feel of the application call stack to identify which areas should I be focusing on. Josh Williams has written...

Why would you visit my blog when there are so many blogs on the internet? I am creating this blog to share the enormous amount of information I have collected while working with Microsoft Technologies especially SQL Server in the past 5 years. I have...

In my previous post http://blogs.msdn.com/gauravbi/archive/2005/12/01/BufferPoolDesc.aspx we talked about analyzing the contents of buffer pool. Let's talk a bit about analyzing the contents of procedure cache- First we need to figure out what are...

Very Interesting observation about CLR assemblies... http://www.sqljunkies.com/WebLog/ktegels/archive/2006/03/06/18506.aspx

By default, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition do not allow remote connections. To configure SQL Server 2005 to allow remote connections, complete all the following steps: Enable remote connections on the instance...

Slava has written a great post on the information available in SQL Server DMV - sys.dm_os_sys_info. This is a great resource for finding Windows system information, such as the CPU tick count, hyperthread ratio, physical and virtual memory, as well as...

Check out the CLR Profiler team's blog . It is a collection for all the great articles profiler team is writing. Some of my favorites are - VSTS FAQ is great introduction on using profiler. Using VSTS Performance Tools to Speed Up Your App (Part 1) is...

Here's an old document on analyzing memory problems. Here's summary - This document is intended to help you diagnose common CLR performance issues. Over the years we have seen a wide variety of CLR performance issues from our customers. This document...

I believe for any performance investigation you need to have a scenario. Something which is believable and real world like. In my opinion scenarios drive requirements and design. I want to have a workload which I can use to test and demonstrate various...

Over next few posts I am going to talk about "a" methodology to do performance assessment / tuning of SQL Server based applications. Main focus will be on SQL Server engine but wherever necessary references to changes needed in application code (non T...

Ryan Byington has written an entry on changes needed for reading performance counters data when logged as non-admin on the box. Basically the change required needs adding yourself to Performance Monitor Users group. For accessing performance counter on...

Kim Hamilto on BCL team has written a great post on performance differences in Named Value Collections and Hashtable. Lookups scale pretty well except that Named Value Collections is 2.6x worse. Addition also scales very well but this time Named Value...