Improving SQL Performance

How do you know how much hardware is really needed by your applications? And what do you do when your applications are overloading your system? The answer lies with improving your SQL performance. You have to tune your hardware SQL server and monitor performance, all of which will be explained as clearly as possible on this page.

The first thing to do when you want to improve your SQL performance is you need to learn how to optimize your system by finding out how much hardware you really need to run your applications. The best way to tune your hardware and monitor performance is through the art of performance monitoring which takes experience, knowledge, and sometimes even luck.

Performance monitoring guidelines:

Make sure youre running your typical processes and work loads during the monitoring.

Dont only do a real-time monitoring of your servers; capture long running logs.

Always have the disk counters turned ON.

Set up the chart windows with an interval of 18 seconds for routine, daily desktop monitoring.

Know the tools you are working with. 
Dont be afraid to experiment.

Know the terminology (objects are lists of individual stats available; counter is a single stat; instance is further breakdown of a counter stat into duplicate components).

A bottleneck happens when the hardware resources cant keep up with the demands of the software. This is usually fixed in one of two ways: first, you identify the limiting hardware and increase its potential (i.e. a faster hard drive or increase the speed of the computer); second, make the software processes use the hardware more efficiently.

Five areas to watch when improving SQL performance and identifying bottlenecks:

Memory usage 
CPU processor utilization 
Disk input/output performance 
User connections 
Blocking locks

About Author:

MAlikahmad

Computer Hardware Preventive Maintenance Software

Computers often break down at the worst of all times. These problems can be averted, or at least minimized with preventive maintenance. Several methods of keeping computer hardware in good working order deal with the external components of the computer, such as the keyboard and monitor. For example, it is important to keep the processor away from excess heat and moisture. There are also computer hardware preventive maintenance software programs that can help with the upkeep of other internal aspects of a computer.

While it is rare to find a CMMS that works on all of a computers hardware, many different programs can be utilized simultaneously. Some computers have periodic automatic updates available that can be downloaded and used to improve the computers performance. Other software programs, known as disk defragmenters, manage hard drive space so that software programs take less time to access. Programs known as hardware diagnostic utilities can check the computers hardware components and alert the user about any potential failures. Since some new hardware will not always work on all computers and could cause existing hardware to malfunction, it is important to have a CMMS program to ensure that the new hardware is compatible with existing hardware.

Antivirus programs are another important component of computer hardware preventive maintenance software. Computer viruses have become increasingly common in recent years and can render a good computer useless. While computer viruses mainly attack software programs, they can ruin hardware as well. Several manufacturers make reliable antivirus software. A couple of well-known companies are Norton and McAfee. As with much preventive maintenance software, these programs are usually available for a free trial period before the user must pay a subscription fee.

Computer hardware preventive maintenance software is necessary to keep computers in good working order. This software manages aspects of computer hardware that would be difficult and time-consuming for even the most computer savvy users.

Texas Stampede supercomputer to join the eXtreme Digital (XD) program

The National Science Foundation is investing $27.5 million to start the project and plans to invest some $50 million throughout the next four years. Stampede will be an Intel and Dell powered system. It will be made of up several thousand Dell Zeus servers containing 8-core processors and each server will contain 32GB of memory.

The cluster will be using Intel’s new Many Integrated Core (MIC) co-processors codenamed “Knights Corner.” This will provide the entire system with a total of 10 petaflops of performance.

Also included in Stampede will be 16 Dell servers with a terabyte of shared memory and 2 GPUs each that will be used for large data analysis. There will be 128 NVIDIA graphics processing units to provide remote visualization and a high performance Lustre file system for data intensive computing. The entire Stampede system will provide a peak performance of 10 petaflops, 272,000 gigabytes of memory and 14 million gigabytes of disk storage.

Stampede will be used to support computational and data driven science and engineering projects throughout the U.S. and allow researchers to create advanced methods for petascale computing. The goal will also be to use Stampede to train the next generation of scientists and researchers in advanced computational science and technology.

The University of Texas at Austin is set to break ground in November 2011 for a new data center which will house Stampede.

More information: Press release