14Sep 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Editorial on SQL Server Central

Misc, Tools
My first one over there. It's discussing whether or not you should do two things, build your own monitoring tool, come out in particular favor of one tool or suite of tools from a single vendor. Please read it and watch the video. And, even more importantly, leave a comment in the discussion.
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09Sep 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Query Fingerprints and Plan Fingerprints

nHibernate, T-SQL
SQL Server 2008 has been released, but the full capabilities of the product are still be discovered. This isn't a case of discovery so much as Microsoft, in the person of Bart Duncan, has shown us something new. Read the article. This is one of the most exciting things I've seen in a long time. It's especially exciting as we see databases becoming less and less manageable through the implementation of tools like nHibernate. As I noted in a previous post, nHibernate will create a lot of execution plans. With the capabilities here, we'll be able to easily and quickly aggregate some of those plans to identify the costly queries coming out of nHibernate without having to resort to 24 hour Profiler monitoring. Great stuff.
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07May 2008 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

SCOM Custom Performance Collection

Tools
I've spent five days struggling with this, but I finally have a custom performance collection up and running. The documentation available for Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM), especially for customization, especially for databases, is weak, and that's being kind. However, there are some guys working hard out there to make a difference. If you need help, the System Center Forum is the place to go. In particular, this little ditty on using property bag objects finally cracked the code for me. The good news, I'm going to write this up in an article for Steve over at SQL Server Central. The better news, I can finally report progress in my daily stand-ups. Sheesh!
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