Sound familiar?

“The SQL Server was performing great yesterday and all of a sudden today the performance is terrible.”

Foglight Performance Analysis has a very powerful feature that allows you compare two different properties of your SQL Server workload.  This scenarios could be:

• Comparing the performance of a database over two different time ranges. 
• Comparing the performance of a single stored procedure over two different time ranges.
• Comparing the performance of database A to database B over the same time range.
• etc…

Take a look at this short tutorial and see how the feature could help you in your environment!  Any questions, feel free to comment.

I read a post recently on The Grateful DBA that describes his analysis in testing different compression levels in LiteSpeed for SQL Server and their impact on both backup size and efficiency.  In his own words this is a “non-scientific, ground-level look at LiteSpeed’s compression ratios”, but I think this approach is a real world approach.  The post describes the pros and cons of higher vs. lower compression levels and where each is appropriate depending on the database environment.  There’s good food for thought in the blog entry and there’s  a pretty graph!  Mmm…food for thought and pretty graph….

Anyway, again, I just waned to repost the blog entry and invite discussion.  Here’s the link again:  http://troygallant.com/?p=155  -  thank you Grateful DBA.

Have a great weekend everybody and good luck getting your last minute Christmas  shopping out of the way.

Today we went RTM with our latest version of LiteSpeed for SQL Server (5.2) and we’ll be going GA with this at the PASS show in Seattle, WA the week of Nov. 2.

We’re really excited about this release as it beefs up our already strong Fast Compression functionality. Fast Compression further reduces the size of backups by only backing up changed data. This improves backup times and lowers storage requirements by 70% or more over and above your current backup and compression strategy.

Again, we look forward to making it generally available during the PASS show and if you’re headed there, please stop by the booth to say hello and see a demo.  See you there!

Andy

Many of you who venture into this area of the website are already familiar with Spotlight. Whether you have experience with the SQL Server flavors of the product, or other editions like those for Active Directory, DB2, Exchange, MySQL, Oracle or Sybase, Spotlight is a very successful and very compelling product for many reasons. Starting roughly a year ago, I embarked on a journey with one of Quest’s best development labs to try to extend that success to our Foglight product line via a product that is now dubbed Foglight for SQL Server. By leveraging the lessons we’ve learned from Spotlight, and after extensive conversations with customers and prospects, we’ve arrived at the dawn of a new era for Foglight, where a download and go product based on the Foglight framework is ready to change the way database diagnosis and monitoring can be achieved in an end-to-end monitoring product. With a wizard-driven installation, automated instance discovery, built-in dashboards, workflows and alarms, and dramatically simplified administration, Foglight for SQL Server is ushering in the age of the special purpose monitor. A product that is designed to focus on a specific domain, for a specific user, but that can later be expanded to encompass a wide range of domains and data. We’ll be showcasing our new technology at the PASS conference in Seattle when we GA on November 3rd, and will be posting a wealth of information to quest.com very shortly. Stay tuned!

Hello all, we get questions from time to time asking how alarms in Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise can be configured to match a specific customers need.  Questions such as:

1) As a database administrator, all of my critical data files are on my F and G drives.  I don’t want to monitor those drives with the same thresholds and alerts as I do my C drive.

2) I have different backup policies for different databases on my servers and I don’t want to alarm on every database the same way.

All of these use cases can be met with Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise’s alarm configurations.  Please watch the video below to see how its done.  If anyone has any questions or comments, or you want to be walked through a use case of your own, leave a comment or post in the forums!

Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise has a great feature titled “Custom Counters” that allows you to incorporate your own custom data collections into the Spotlight Enterprise framework for data collection, diagnostics, and reporting.  This post will serve as a getting started guide to assist in adding custom counters to your Spotlight deployment.

First off, a disclaimer.  Due to the “open” nature of custom counters, Quest Software makes no guarantees as to the overhead or accuracy of any custom counter.  Custom Counters should be fully tested and validated in a customer’s environment prior to loading onto a production system.

For documentation on the counter used in this screencast as well as other possible counters, head to the Articles -> Documentation -> Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise section of this site, or click on the link below:

http://sqlserver.quest.com/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=372

If you have any questions, please post them to the forum.