Executing performance tuning for SQL is a crucial skillset for the enterprise development teams, which keep relational DBs at their backend. Many database professionals think that they can leave their RDBMS settings as they default to ensure the best performance. However, this doesn’t seem right. Often, default settings of relational database management systems that come preconfigured are far from being optimal. You need to optimize these settings further to ensure the best performance and avoid any future flaws.
Some programmers believe that SQL performance tuning is the most important task to accomplish, but only DBAs can do it. However, this, too, is wrong. At the first point, not all organizations may have DBAs. It may depend on the company’s size and structure as to what positions they have dedicated for database management. Even if there is a dedicated DBA to handle database management activities, it does not mean that all such database activities can be left to them. There are certain things developers themselves can accomplish. For example, a developer can diagnose and troubleshoot a slow query.
To do this, developers also needed to be equipped with the needed knowledge to find SQL queries and do some performance tuning. Let us explore some tips as to how to do it.
SQL Performance Tuning
At the baseline, performance tuning for SQL consists of making the queries of relational DBs run optimally. As you can identify on going deeper, SQL performance tuning is not a standalone tool or technique to try out. Rather, it is a sequence of best practices that includes various techniques, processes, and tools to make use of. Let us see how it is.
Generate an execution plan
To diagnose the slow queries, it is important to generate a graphical execution plan, which you will manage by using the Server Management Studio of SQL. The execution plans are usually generated after the queries are run. But how can you go about generating the right execution plan?
- To start with, you can go to the ‘Database Engine Query’ at the SQL Server Management Studio toolbar.
- From there, enter the query and click on the ‘Include Actual Execution Plan’ tab on the menu.
- Next, you can run the query. For this, click on the ‘execute’ toolbar or press F5.
- You can see the SQL Server Management Studio displaying the execution plan at the results pane under the “execution pane” field.
Monitor the resource usage
Optimal resource usage is an important factor to consider in terms of SQL database performance. As you cannot improve what you cannot measure, you should monitor and scale the resource usage. Reliable remote database administration services like RemoteDBA.com can also help you achieve these goals.
For this, if you use Windows, you can explore the System Monitor tool, which will help measure the SQL Server performance. It will let you view the
- SQL Server
- Performance counters
- The behavior of different objects etc.
At the System Monitor, you can simultaneously keep track of Windows and SQL Server counters. So, you can also check and verify any correlation between the performance of these two.
Database Engine Tuning Advisor
While thinking of SQL performance tuning, an important approach is to analyze the Transact-SQL statements that run against databases you want to tune. For this, you can effectively use the Database Engine Tuning Advisor tool, which will do a thorough analysis of the performance implications. This tool goes far beyond the basics and can also recommend actions you have to take based on the analysis. For example, it can advise you to create indexes or remove these when needed.
Find queries with SQL DMVs
Another advanced feature of SQL Server is DMV or dynamic management views. This is a built-in feature, and there are dozens of these to provide a lot of information about different topics. Many DMVs provide comprehensive data about the query stats, recent queries, execution plans, and more. All these can be combined to gain some actionable insights.
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Query Reporting through APM Solutions
Another great feature to explore is APM or application performance management. This is a set of tools that can handle SQL queries. Retrace can track the SQL queries across various DB providers like SQL Server. Retrace can give a clear picture of how many times a particular query was run, how long it took to execute on an average, and which all transactions called for it. This valuable info for APM solutions and SQL performance tuning may collect data by doing adequate performance profiling against the runtime application codes. Retrace is also a lightweight code profiler, which can also capture the request traces of ASP.NET and show the full context of what an SQL code is doing. Retrace also ensures comprehensive SQL reporting based on its APM capabilities. It also features multiple monitoring and notification features for various SQL queries.
APM solutions enable detailed reporting of various apps, of every app, and also per each query. It can show every transaction trace in a detailed view and how these queries are used. However, it does not provide many reads and writes per query.
SQL Server Extended Events
Microsoft offers SQL Server Extended Events as an advanced solution. It works via Event Tracing or ETW, which is the common way for a wide spectrum of Microsoft technologies to explore the diagnostic data. ETW offers more flexibility than the other diagnostic tools, and the developers can easily go into ETW events from the SQL Server to data collection. This is a very cool and powerful feature.
SQL Server Extended Events is much easier to enable and disable. It is also very comfortable to build custom solutions with it. However, there are some cons for this as it is fairly new, many people are still not fully aware of its usage and features.
So, when you need to try out some performance tuning for SQL server next time, you can explore these options at your disposal. You may also try to use more than one of these solutions based on what tasks you have to accomplish.
