SQL Community is good to be part of.
It’s interesting to sometimes compare the flow of information about SQL Server to that available for other products.
I’m currently working on an application which runs on SQL Server but by default / was developed with an ISAM back end.
This particular application is very important for my client so discussions about how good or bad it is are irrelevant; the critical point is to tune it.
It’s been interesting trying to obtain information for the application, the user forums for this product don’t have the same community feel about them as SQL Server and the vendor web site is only available to those third parties that sell the product, not the end users.
I’ve found the user forums really unhelpful with the general response to questions to be to not answer the question and to tell you to hire an “expert”, in my case it means I have to come to terms with the application, for its sins it handles sql server indexes and such, if you’ve encountered one of these type of apps I’m sure you’ll understand what I mean, if not then basically the application provides an interface to manage the indexing – fine you might think – well not always – generally these apps may drop any indexes they find in the database which are not in the application or worse still they append extra columns to the index without telling you – to enforce uniqueness.
There are, of course, a number of “experts” for the application and they usually seem in this case to be only willing to sell themselves as consultants and sell you products which duplicate functionality in SQL Server, well I’m a cynical as well as grumpy! One such consultant advertises to guarantee to improve performance 100% - hmm – if only we could all make that claim!
I worry when reading recommendations, especially when they include turning off auto update stats and create stats ( this is an oltp type app ) . Another recommendation is to turn off parallelism although it’s claimed the application doesn’t suffer from parallel scans. It’s also claimed the application doesn’t use tempdb, well it’s an interesting viewpoint, I have statistical data gathering installed – see http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/archive/2006/11/28/p-0-creating-a-baseline-part-3.aspx
and I can see that at times tempdb is handling around one third of the total throughput on the server, it’s dedicated to the app btw.
I wonder sometimes how these conclusions are drawn, I had the opportunity to tune a database which didn’t have clustered indexes – “ If you put clustered indexes on the database it breaks ” – eventually I got to add clustered indexes, but it took a long time and there was nothing documented as to where this conclusion had been drawn. Maybe it’s how urban myths are born! Oh and it didn't break, just went faster.
So in conclusion I just want to say thanks to all those individuals from the community and Microsoft who take the time to share their knowledge and help us, my only problem is trying to keep up with it all, just be glad you don’t encounter some of the applications from the dark side < grin >
Ps. I feel so much better after that !