Tracking Query Plan Changes

I was reading a blog post from Brent Ozar (SQL Server Query Store), which detailed Microsoft's announced future feature in SQL Server that aims to store a history of cached execution plans. The main purpose, it seems, of such a feature is to aid in performance troubleshooting and tuning. If something has changed recently and a query or store procedure begins behaving badly, there will be another tool in the DBA toolbelt to aid in finding what happened. Beyond that I'll let others explain it further.

Tracking Page Splits

As a DBA, performance tuning is a regular ongoing task. In my experience it is both a reactive and proactive task. The goal, though, is for your proactive efforts to minimise the time spent on the reactive. This has lead me to focus more on page splitting and index fill factor. Specifically, their interaction. There is a lot of information on the web about the benefits and dangers of fill factor and the performance implications of high rates of page splitting, so I will not go into it too much. I will discuss what I've done to monitor page splits. I then tweak fillfactor on the worst offending tables and indexes.

Running DBCC CHECKDB on TEMPDB

First, a confession. I've been doing it wrong for a long time. Only recently have I learned that TempDB should be included in regular CHECKDB maintenance. Ok, now that I've got that off my chest, I can continue.

So now I've been diligently setting up this task on all servers. NB: TempDB is not available within Maintenance Plans, so you'll need to write the tsql in a job. I add it as a second step in my dbcc maintenance plan job.

Full List of SQL Server 2014 DMVs

I'm not sure how useful this will be to others, but I keep searching for a single, comprehensive list of all the SQL Server DMVs with short descriptions. I am looking to complete a certification and this should prove handy for studying. This is certainly no replacement for the full descriptions and examples on MSDN, but I thought it worth putting together.