Let’s take a look at this month’s participating blog posts:
Fellow Certified Master (MCM) Rob Farley (blog|@rob_farley) led off with Waiting, waiting…. Rob talks about what causes SQL Server (and computers in general) to be slow and how to baseline SQL Server waits to detect the cause of slowness.
Boris Hristov (blog|@BorisHristov) talked about an interesting case of very high CXPacket waits and the odd cause for it in his situation.
Jeffrey Verheul (blog|@DevJef) explains some common wait types and how to effectively use sp_whoisactive* to find troubleshooting data.
* sp_WhoIsActive is an awesome free tool from T-SQL Tuesday founder Adam Machanic (Blog|@AdamMachanic).
Tracy McKibben (blog|@RealSQLGuy) offered up the best title of the month with Don’t Bring a Tank to a Prison Fight. Tracy calls back to a post he made 2 weeks prior where he provided a script for collecting wait information on your SQL Servers. In this post, he follows up by showing you some of the things you can do with the information it has been collecting (or will be if you are just now downloading his script).
Dave Green (blog|@d_a_green) gives us a new way to think of waits and parallelism in SQL Server through the analogy of a shop owner of a little corner shop / post office.
Matan Yungman (blog|@MatanYungman) brought us back to CXPacket waits with Using CXPacket Waits to Detect Query Bottlenecks. Matan shares some of the information he learned from Paul White’s (blog|@SQL_Kiwi) PASS Summit presentation on parallel query execution and goes on to show how you can find bottlenecks by analyzing CXPacket waits.
Kenneth Fisher (blog) talked about some of the resources he uses for understanding waits and offers up some advice on how to think about wait information.
Jes Borland (blog|@grrl_geek) focused on the DBA Core skill of base-lining waits and activity to understand what is appropriate for your server SQL Server, Waits, and You.
Russ Thomas (blog|@SQLJudo) decided to focus on one specific wait type that gets very little press. What are you WAITFOR? takes a look at the WAITFOR wait type and what it may mean if you are seeing it a lot.
Robert Pearl (blog|@Pearlknows) gave us a primer on Waits & Queues. He explained the basics of what waits & queues are, how to investigate them, and how to use them.
Robert L Davis (blog|@SQLSoldier) — that’s me — shared my My Go-To Query For Waiting Tasks that I use whenever I get a basic report that SQL Server is slow.
Dan Hess (blog|@SQLDCH/) shared a story of how his servers were adversely affected by the BACKUPTHREAD wait type and how he used recently learned skills to discover and deal with the problem in What’re we waitin’ fer?!?!?.
Good friend and former colleague Vicky Harp (blog|@vickyharp) shared some tactics for dealing with hung sessions from the rarely discussed external OS wait type in Killing Sessions with External Wait Types.
Amit Banerjee (blog|@banerjeeamit), another good friend (whose deep knowledge of SQL Server internals belies his youth), gave us Why was SQL waiting?. Amit told us how to use the data collected by and imported into SQLNexus to diagnose problems that show up through waits in SQL Server.
Thanks again to everyone involved! See you next month at the same bat Tuesday on a different bat blog.
Tracy McKibben
I knew you’d get a kick out of my title!
SQLSoldier
Indeed! I also stole your animated graphic at the bottom. Now just to think of a good DBAReaction to go along with it. 😉
My links of the week – December 15, 2013 | R4
[…] Last week was T-SQL Tuesday week, Waits being this month’s subject. Robert L. Davis was the host, and several interesting posts are included in his roundup: T-SQL Tuesday #49: Wait For It Roundup. […]
(SFTW) SQL Server Links 20/12/13 • John Sansom
[…] T-SQL Tuesday #49: Wait For It Roundup – A round-up of all the great T-SQL content from last week with your host Robert L. Davis(Blog|Twitter). […]
Always Waiting, Waiting Waiting | SQL RNNR
[…] It’s even a bit of coincidence because the topic today would have also worked very well for the TSQL Tuesday topic this month. Â Robert Davis invited all to participate by writing about waits in SQL Server in some fashion or another. Â You can read a bit about that from his roundup, with all of the necessary links, here. […]
Zola
Hi
May I please get help the Microsoft 70-461 exam prep. Which material can i use?
SQLSoldier
Hi Zola. To be perfectly honest with you, I didn’t use any exam prep material so I can’t personally recommend any. However, the official Microsoft training kit is a recommendation I hear others make a lot. You can find the one for exam 70-461 here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/book.aspx?ID=16113
SQL Solutions Group – Always Waiting, Waiting Waiting
[…] It’s even a bit of coincidence because the topic today would have also worked very well for the TSQL Tuesday topic this month.  Robert Davis invited all to participate by writing about waits in SQL Server in some fashion or another.  You can read a bit about that from his roundup, with all of the necessary links, here. […]