Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Experienced SQL Server database administrators and developers spend years learning best practices within SQL Server and how to identify performance pitfalls in the query optimizer. Starting with SQL Server 2017, Microsoft introduced a family of features called “Intelligent Query Processing” to provide more consistent performance for your queries.

Each year, SolarWinds® surveys IT professionals around the world to gauge what’s most pressing on their minds, but also to understand their organization’s challenges and how they intend to overcome them. In 2021, we wanted to know what organizations think of the increasing risks they face from both the reality of supporting the hybrid workplace and the expanding cyberthreat landscape—and how they’ve prepared to address them.

When you issue a query to SQL Server or Azure SQL, it internally tries to optimize a query plan through calculations such as whether to use an index. Much of SQL Server’s query plans are based on its best guess of what will happen at run time when your query executes. Even when SQL Server guesses right, as your data changes (especially as the volume of data increases), optimal plans can end up performing so poorly, they can drag your whole system’s performance down.

An important skill in database performance tuning is capturing, reading, and understanding query execution plans. The query execution plan is a roadmap of the resources allocated and operations performed when the database engine gathers the results of your query.

The 2020 SolarWinds® IT Pro Day survey looked at the changing roles and responsibilities of IT pros throughout the pandemic. Overall, nearly two-thirds of surveyed IT pros discovered a new sense of confidence, despite contending with challenges such as reduced budgets, greater decision-making responsibilities, and longer hours caused by their organizations’ response to the pandemic.

There should always be opportunities to laud our peers’ achievements and good work. One of the things I’ve noticed (at least here in America) is we tend to speak up about negative things and more quietly acknowledge the good. I want us to get better at publicly celebrating the success of our peers. IT Pro Day is nearly upon us, and this means there’s an opportunity to recognize our peers through the second annual awards.

Recently, my colleagues Pete Di Stefano, Ashley Adams, and I hosted a webcast on the topic of capacity planning and optimization. You can listen/watch it here, it was a really fun conversation. As part of the discussion, we talked about the need to measure the right things to get the correct outcome. Keep in mind my oft-repeated mantra: monitoring is simply the collection of data. You need a robust, mature tool to add context, which transforms those metrics into information.