SQL Performance

JULY 24, 2022

SQL Server 2012 went out of all forms of official support about two weeks ago, on July 12 th. Best approaches for running totals – updated for SQL Server 2012. In the very first post on this site, I compared the performance of long-standing running totals methods with the new windowing functions added in SQL Server 2012.

Servers 66

Servers Strategy Availability Processing 66

Brendan Gregg

JULY 4, 2021

It's an exciting time for developments in computer performance, not just for the BPF technology (which I often [write about]) but also for processors with 3D stacking and cloud vendor CPUs (e.g., This was a chance to talk about other things I've been working on, such as the present and future of hardware performance.

Performance 52

Performance Latency Hardware Storage 52

Brendan Gregg

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

At USENIX SREcon22 APAC I gave the opening keynote on the future of computer performance, rounding up the latest developments and making predictions of where I see things heading. This talk originated from my updates to Systems Performance 2nd Edition , and this was the first time I've given this talk in person!

Performance 52

Performance Latency Cache Virtualization 52

SQL Performance

JUNE 21, 2019

I've been teaching and writing about common SQL Server mistakes for many years. This article will expand on my previous article and point out how these apply to SQL Server , Azure SQL Database , and Azure SQL Managed Instance. SQL Server Agent alerts. This situation applies to on-premises SQL Server and IaaS. Statistics.

Servers 49

Servers Azure Hardware Database 49

Alex Russell

MARCH 6, 2021

Back in 2016, I gave a talk outlining the causes and effects of the terrible performance of web apps built using popular tools on the fastest-growing device segment: low-end to mid-range Android phones. Poor performance has a compound effect on user expectations at an ecosystem level. Live by the link, die by the link.

Performance 124

Performance Network Cache Metrics 124

SQL Performance

AUGUST 23, 2019

In traditional row-mode execution plans, SQL Server may introduce a Bitmap operator as part of performing early semi join reduction before a parallel hash or merge join. There have been major improvements since the first appearance of the batch mode execution engine in SQL Server 2012. Background. The Query Optimizer.

Servers 75

Servers Engineering Efficiency Retail 75

SQL Performance

JULY 16, 2019

A close monitoring of the hardware enthusiast community, including many of the most respected hardware analysts and reviewers paints an even more dire picture about Intel in the server processor space. Despite all of this, Intel is not going to lose their entire server processor business any time soon. So, what has changed my mind?

Servers 46

Servers Hardware Architecture Retail 46

Dynatrace

APRIL 5, 2021

The 2014 launch of AWS Lambda marked a milestone in how organizations use cloud services to deliver their applications more efficiently, by running functions at the edge of the cloud without the cost and operational overhead of on-premises servers. Optimizing Lambda for performance. Dynatrace news. What is AWS Lambda?

Lambda 179

Lambda AWS Serverless Hardware 179

Dynatrace

JUNE 15, 2023

If your application runs on servers you manage, either on-premises or on a private cloud, you’re responsible for securing the application as well as the operating system, network infrastructure, and physical hardware. The financial services sector alone saw a surge in web application and API attacks of 257% from 2021 to 2022.

Cloud 175

Cloud Open Source Architecture Monitoring 175

SQL Server According to Bob

SEPTEMBER 26, 2016

When we released Always On Availability Groups in SQL Server 2012 as a new and powerful way to achieve high availability, hardware environments included NUMA machines with low-end multi-core processors and SATA and SAN drives for storage (some SSDs). As we moved towards SQL Server 2014, the pace of hardware accelerated.

Availability 40

Availability Servers Hardware Benchmarking 40

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

These strange questions came to the fore back in 2014 when Netflix was switching services from CentOS Linux to Ubuntu, and I helped debug several weird performance issues including one I'll describe here. A quick check of basic performance statistics showed over 30% higher CPU consumption. How long does it take to read the time?

Speed 126

Speed Java AWS Virtualization 126

Dynatrace

MAY 31, 2021

Since Kubernetes emerged in 2014, it has become a popular solution for scaling, managing, and automating the deployments of containerized applications in distributed environments. With apps growing larger and more complex by the day, IT teams will require tools to help manage these deployments. Resource optimization.

Virtualization 133

Virtualization DevOps Infrastructure Cloud 133

SQL Performance

JULY 27, 2021

Continuing my series of articles on latches, this time I’m going to discuss the DBCC_OBJECT_METADATA latch and show how it can be a major bottleneck for consistency checks prior to SQL Server 2016 under certain circumstances. But remember, this bottleneck only happens for versions of SQL Server earlier than SQL Server 2016.

C++ 54

C++ Servers Database Code 54

Rigor

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

Reading time 16 min Whether you’re a web performance expert, an evangelist for the culture of performance, a web engineer incorporating performance into your process, or someone new to the web performance entirely, you probably identify as curious, excited about new ideas, and always learning. Rick Byers.

Performance 89

Performance Education Google Website 89

The Morning Paper

FEBRUARY 11, 2020

In a model for others to follow, the Caddy web server will automatically provision Let’s Encrypt certificates. Apache and Nginx remain the most popular Let’s Encrypt using web servers deployed in the wild though. Operational isolation with no access to data centres and adminstration performed remotely. The last word.

Internet 119

Internet Internet Open Source Transportation 119

SQL Server According to Bob

JUNE 22, 2016

Prior to SQL Server 2016 the trace flag –T8048 is used to upgrade (only) NUMA partitioned, CMemThread objects to CPU partitioned based objects. Keep in mind that the vast majority of CMemThread objects (SQL 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2014, Azure DB and 2016) are not partitioned. Trace flag –T8048 longer exists in SQL Server 2016.

Servers 40

Servers Azure Software Engineering Design 40

SQL Server According to Bob

JUNE 6, 2016

As indicated, SQL Server 2016 added the use of SSE and AVX instructions in various code paths to improve performance. This post will outline SQL Server’s decisions around SSE/AVX or software algorithm use. SQL Server asks the CPU if it supports SSE or AVX in order to determine the level of hardware support present on the system.

Servers 40

Servers Hardware Software Engineering Software 40

SQL Performance

MAY 1, 2019

This is reflected in the summary tables included in the Data Loading Performance Guide and the Tiger Team post. The summary rows for heap tables without indexes are the same in both documents (no changes for SQL Server 2016): An explicit TABLOCK hint is not the only way to meet the requirement for table-level locking.

Servers 47

Servers Database Testing Performance 47

SQL Performance

MARCH 17, 2020

Back in 2014, I wrote an article called Performance Tuning the Whole Query Plan. This follow-up post revisits the question for SQL Server 2019, using a larger number of rows. It has 32GB RAM, with 24GB available to the SQL Server 2019 instance. Performance is competitive at around 15ms. Test Environment.

Servers 86

Servers Tuning Database Efficiency 86

Dynatrace

FEBRUARY 25, 2021

Since its introduction by AWS in 2014, AWS Lambda has revolutionized the compute space and boosted the entire serverless movement. We’re talking about a few hundred milliseconds, but this can have a considerable performance impact when cold starts occur too often. Dynatrace news. What’s next.

Lambda 217

Lambda AWS Monitoring Serverless 217

SQL Performance

MAY 16, 2019

Achieving minimal logging using INSERT.SELECT into an empty clustered index target is not quite as simple as described in the Data Performance Loading Guide. The Data Loading Performance Guide contains a high-level summary of the conditions required for minimal logging into clustered tables: This post is concerned with the top row only.

Cache 67

Cache Servers Testing Storage 67

Brendan Gregg

JULY 2, 2021

I chose these to find the most performance wins with the fewest tools. The architecture is: While the bpftrace binary is installed on all the target systems, the bpftrace tools (text files) live on a web server and are pushed out when needed. execsnoop New processes (via exec(2)) table. opensnoop Files opened table. at the time.

Latency 145

Latency Cache Energy Systems 145

Percona

JUNE 4, 2023

In this blog, we’ll provide a comparison between MariaDB vs. MySQL (including Percona Server for MySQL ). Introduction: MariaDB vs. MySQL The goal of this blog post is to evaluate, at a higher level, MariaDB vs. MySQL vs. Percona Server for MySQL side-by-side to better inform the decision making process. Contact us to learn more!

Open Source 52

Open Source Servers Storage Scalability 52

High Scalability

JUNE 22, 2018

Each drone is rated with a game mechanic and gets special privileges based on performance (just kidding). Charlie Demerjian : what does Intel have planned for their server roadmap? For the same reason the 14/10nm messaging is causing consternation among investors, but the server side is in much worse shape. How bad is it?

Internet 113

Internet Internet Scalability Artificial Intelligence 113

SQL Performance

FEBRUARY 22, 2021

I would like to share a couple of recent examples that help illustrate how using deprecated SQL Server features continues to bite us. The system table sys.sysprocesses was replaced way back in SQL Server 2005 by a set of dynamic management views (DMVs), most notably sys.dm_exec_requests , sys.dm_exec_sessions , and sys.dm_exec_connections.

Latency 57

Latency Servers Monitoring Systems 57

MachMetrics

JUNE 16, 2020

Secondly, SSL/HTTPS unlocks additional web performance benefits that more than make up for the added latency. Google made SSL use a ranking factor way back in 2014, and since Chrome 68, a “Not Secure” warning appears next to the URL of sites that aren’t using HTTPS. How HTTPS Improves Performance.

Speed 86

Speed Latency Google Website 86

SQL Performance

APRIL 8, 2019

These AMD EPYC processors have a number of advantages for SQL Server workloads, as I will explain in this article. This 14nm first-generation AMD EPYC 7551 processor has 32 cores and 64 threads, and it works in one or two-socket servers. This makes it a good choice for many SQL Server workloads, especially DW workloads.

Azure 42

Azure Virtualization Storage Benchmarking 42

ACM Sigarch

MARCH 25, 2019

Figure 1 depicts a simple queue where tasks arrive, are optionally queued in the buffers to the left if the server is already busy, are then serviced one at a time in the circular server, and depart to the right. Amdahl Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Systems 53

Systems Latency Performance C++ 53

Brendan Gregg

NOVEMBER 29, 2017

Hardware virtualization for cloud computing has come a long way, improving performance using technologies such as VT-x, SR-IOV, VT-d, NVMe, and APICv. The latest AWS hypervisor, Nitro, uses everything to provide a new hardware-assisted hypervisor that is easy to use and has near bare-metal performance.

Virtualization 111

Virtualization AWS Hardware Storage 111

The Netflix TechBlog

APRIL 17, 2019

Netflix headquarters circa 2014. Scalable Video Technology (SVT) is Intel’s open source framework that provides high-performance software video encoding libraries for developers of visual cloud technologies. You can track the SVT-AV1 performance progress on the beta of AWCY (AreWeCompressedYet) website.

Open Source 166

Open Source Scalability Speed Efficiency 166

SQL Performance

JULY 1, 2019

The results are technically non-deterministic since SQL Server could validly return any one of the rows in each group. Nevertheless, if you run this query yourself, you are quite likely to see the same result I do: The execution plan depends on the version of SQL Server used, and does not depend on database compatibility level.

C++ 58

C++ Servers Database Performance 58

SQL Performance

MARCH 8, 2021

SQL Server 2014 SP2 and later produce runtime (“actual”) execution plans that can include elapsed time and CPU usage for each execution plan operator (see KB3170113 and this blog post by Pedro Lopes). SQL Server makes some timing adjustments in parallel plans to promote consistency, but they are not perfectly implemented.

Servers 95

Servers Tuning Architecture Processing 95

SQL Server According to Bob

JUNE 3, 2016

SQL Server 2016 ‘It Just Runs Faster’ A bold statement that any SQL Server professional can stand behind with confidence. Try SQL Server 2016 Today. The SQL Server Development team tasked several individuals with scalability improvements and real world testing patterns. – [link]. Follow-up.

Hardware 40

Hardware Software Engineering Transportation Scalability 40

SQL Server According to Bob

JUNE 3, 2016

SQL Server 2016 changes the internal design to (CheckScanner), applying no lock semantics and a design similar to those used with In-Memory Optimized (Hekaton) objects, allowing DBCC operations to scale far better than previous releases. Ryan Stonecipher – Principle SQL Server Software Engineer. SQL Server. set nocount on.

Hardware 40

Hardware Cache Servers Software Engineering 40

SQL Performance

OCTOBER 29, 2019

There are multiple methods to look at poorly performing queries in SQL Server, notably Query Store, Extended Events, and dynamic management views (DMVs). Extended Events provides data about the individual execution of queries, while Query Store and the DMVs aggregate performance data. Each option has pros and cons.

C++ 74

C++ Database Servers Tuning 74

SQL Server According to Bob

JULY 12, 2016

Trace flags 2562 and 2549 are documented in knowledgebase article: [link] and the blog post [link] highlights the SQL 2016 DBCC performance improvements. For SQL Server 2008, 2012 and 2014 the trace flag behavior remains the same. This is behavior is unchanged in SQL Server 2016.

Servers 40

Servers Design Engineering Database 40

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

These strange questions came to the fore back in 2014 when Netflix was switching services from CentOS Linux to Ubuntu, and I helped debug several weird performance issues including one I'll describe here. A quick check of basic performance statistics showed over 30% higher CPU consumption. How long does it take to read the time?

Speed 40

Speed Java AWS Virtualization 40