When the SQL Server (2000/2005/2008) is running sluggish, what is the first command that you run to see where the problem is?
The purpose of this question is that, when all answers are compiled, other users can benefit by running your command of choice to segregate where the problem might be.
There are other troubleshooting posts regarding SQL Server performance but they can be useful only for specific cases.
If you roll out and run your own custom SQL script,
then would you let others know what
the purpose of the script is
it returns (return value)
to do to figure out where problem is
If you could provide source for the script, please post it.
In my case,
sp_lock
I run to figure out if there are any locks (purpose) to return SQL server lock information. Since result set displays object IDs (thus not so human readable), I would usually skim through result to see if there are abnormally many locks.
Feel free to update tags
Why run a single query when a picture is worth a thousand words!
I prefer to run the freely avaialable Performance Dashboard Reports.
They provide a complete snapshot overview of your servers performance in seconds. You can then choose the a specific area to investigate (locking, currently running queries, wait requests etc.) simply by clicking the apporpriate area on the Dashboard.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1d3a4a0d-7e0c-4730-8204-e419218c1efc&displaylang=en
One slight caveat, I beleive these are only available in SQL 2005 and above.
sp_who
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260384(SQL.80).aspx
I want to see "who", what machines/users are running what queries, length of time, etc. I can also easily scan for blocks.
If something is blocking a bunch of other transactions I can use the spid to issue a kill command if necessary.
sp_who_3 - Provides a lot of information available elsewhere but in one nice output. Also has several parameters to allow customized output.
A custom query which combines what you would expect in sp_who with DBCC INPUTBUFFER(spid) to get the last query text on each spid ordered by the blocked/blocking graph.
Process data is avaliable via master..sysprocesses.
sp_who3 returns standand sp_who2 output, until you specify a specific spid, then gives 6 different recordsets about that spid including locks, blocks, what it's currently doing, the T/SQL it's running, and the statement within the T/SQL that is currently running.
Ian Stirk has a great script I like to use as detailed in this article: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-ca/magazine/cc135978.aspx
In particular, I like the missing indexes one:
SELECT
DatabaseName = DB_NAME(database_id)
,[Number Indexes Missing] = count(*)
FROM sys.dm_db_missing_index_details
GROUP BY DB_NAME(database_id)
ORDER BY 2 DESC;
DBCC OPENTRAN to see what the oldest active transaction is
Displays information about the oldest
active transaction and the oldest
distributed and nondistributed
replicated transactions, if any,
within the specified database. Results
are displayed only if there is an
active transaction or if the database
contains replication information. An
informational message is displayed if
there are no active transactions.
followed by sp_who2
I use queries like those:
Number of open/active connections in ms sql server 2005
Related
Is there a Script which finds the current activity
from application->login->Database->Table->Column level ?
I have used
SP_who2, sp_who2'Active',Sysprocesses
Activity Monitor
Audit
Profiler
Trigger
Extended Events
and coludnt get column level data connections, i was able to get the sql statements, table name, database,instance, application, login name ...but I couldn't get Column Names
the reason I am trying to find to track all usage and re architect the Database..
any help is appreciated
SP_who2 and sp_who are the ones I have even used to get the required information. You can as well check against sys.sysprocesses to know about processes that are running on an instance of SQL Server.
If you want the columns involved in the queries then consider using SQL Server Tracing probably.
I'm looking for a query to get the current running queries in Azure SQL. All of the T-SQL I've found do not show the running queries when I test them (for instance, run a query in one window, then look in another window at the running queries). Also, I'm not looking for anything related to the time, CPU, etc, but only the actual running query text.
When I run ...
SELECT * FROM Table --(takes 2 minutes to load)
... and run a standard information query (like from Pinal Dave or this), I don't see the above query (I assume there's another way).
select * from sys.dm_exec_requests should give you what other sessions are doing.You can join this with sys.dm_exec_sql_text to get the text if needed. sys.dm_tran_locks gives the locks hold / waiting. If this is V12 server you can also use dbcc inutbuffer. Make sure that the connection you are running is dbo / server admin
I am trying to retrieve around 200 billion rows from a remote SQL Server. To optimize this, I have limited my query to use only an indexed column as a filter and am selecting only a subset of columns to make the query look like this:
SELECT ColA, ColB, ColC FROM <Database> WHERE RecordDate BETWEEN '' AND ''
But it looks like unless I limit my query to a time window of a few hours, the query fails in all cases with the following error:
OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI10" for linked server "<>" returned message "Query timeout expired".
Msg 7399, Level 16, State 1, Server M<, Line 1
The OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI10" for linked server "<>" reported an error. Execution terminated by the provider because a resource limit was reached.
Msg 7421, Level 16, State 2, Server <>, Line 1
Cannot fetch the rowset from OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI10" for linked server "<>".
The timeout is probably an issue because of the time it takes to execute the query plan. As I do not have control over the server, I was wondering if there is a good way of retrieving this data beyond the simple SELECT I am using. Are there any SQL Server specific tricks that I can use? Perhaps tell the remote server to paginate the data instead of issuing multiple queries or something else? Any suggestions on how I could improve this?
This is more of the kind of job SSIS is suited for. Even a simple flow like ReadFromOleDbSource->WriteToOleDbSource would handle this, creating the necessary batching for you.
Why read 200 Billion rows all at once?
You should page them, reading say a few thousand rows at a time.
Even if you do genuinely need to read all 200 Billion rows you should still consider using paging to break up the read into shorter queries - that way if a failure happens you just continue reading where you left off.
See efficient way to implement paging for at least one method of implementing paging using ROW_NUMBER
If you are doing data analysis then I suspect you are either using the wrong storage (SQL Server isn't really designed for processing of large data sets), or you need to alter your queries so that the analysis is done on the Server using SQL.
Update: I think the last paragraph was somewhat misinterpreted.
Storage in SQL Server is primarily designed for online transaction processing (OLTP) - efficient querying of massive datasets in massively concurrent environments (for example reading / updating a single customer record in a database of billions, at the same time that thousands of other users are doing the same for other records). Typically the goal is to minimise the amout of data read, reducing the amount of IO needed and also reducing contention.
The analysis you are talking about is almost the exact opposite of this - a single client actively trying to read pretty much all records in order to perform some statistical analysis.
Yes SQL Server will manage this, but you have to bear in mind that it is optimised for a completely different scenario. For example data is read from disk a page (8 KB) at a time, despite the fact that your statistical processing is probably only based on 2 or 3 columns. Depending on row density and column width you may only be using a tiny fraction of the data stored on an 8 KB page - most of the data that SQL Server had to read and allocate memory for wasn't even used. (Remember that SQL Server also had to lock that page to prevent other users from messing with the data while it was being read).
If you are serious about processing / analysis of massive datasets then there are storage formats that are optimised for exactly this sort of thing - SQL Server also has an add on service called Microsoft Analysis Services that adds additional online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities, using storage modes more suited to this sort of processing.
Personally I would use a data extraction tool such as BCP to get the data to a local file before trying to manipulate it if I was trying to pull that much data at once.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162802.aspx
This isn't A SQL Server specific answer, but even when the rDBMS supports server side cursors, it's considered poor form to use them. Doing so means that you are consuming resources on the server even though the server is still waiting for you to request more data.
Instead you should reformulate your query usage so that the server can transmit the entire result set as soon as it can, and then completely forget about you and your query to make way for the next one. When the result set is too large for you process all in one go, you should keep track of the last row returned by the current batch so that you can fetch another batch starting at that position.
Odds are the remote server has the "Remote Query Timeout" set. How long does it take for the query to fail?
Just run into the same problem, I also had the message at 10:01 after running the query.
Check this link. There's a remote query timeout setting under Connections that's setup to 600secs by default and you need to change it to zero (unlimited) or other value you think is right.
Try to change remote server connection timeout property.
For that go to SSMS, connect to the server, right click on server's name in object explorer, further select Properties -> Connections and change value in the Remote query timeout (in seconds, 0 = no timeout) text box.
One of my developers working on a trigger-based logging facility in SQL Server 2008 asked me if there was a command to retrieve the most recently executed SQL command within T-SQL. I thought there was a system stored procedure for just such a function, but it's possible I'm thinking of another product from a prior decade... online searches yielded us no results.
Does anyone have information on anything of the sort?
sure try this :
SELECT
DMExQryStats.last_execution_time AS [Executed At],
DMExSQLTxt.text AS [Query]
FROM
sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS DMExQryStats
CROSS APPLY
sys.dm_exec_sql_text(DMExQryStats.sql_handle) AS DMExSQLTxt
ORDER BY
DMExQryStats.last_execution_time DESC
it will returns recently executed queries along with the date and time at which they were executed
Well, the procedure that retrieves the most current SQL batch can safely return itself :)
On a serious note, you can look at sys.dm_exec_query_stats and sys.dm_exec_procedure_stats to see when a plan was last time executed, based on the last_execution_time column. But note that the method is not reliable because it does not account for plans that were evicted from the cache after execution.
What does "most recent" mean in the context of a multi-core machine?
Also, does he mean the most recently started, or the most recently finished?
Finally, he should just open SSMS and look at Activity Monitor.
say I want to find the latest added rows (UPDATE by any user, not necessarily the one which is executing UPDATE) in XX table.
You would need to use a Transaction Log reader tool. There are several free ones available as well as commercial offerings.
ApexSQL Log
You could also try this undocumented command:
DBCC LOG(<database name>[,{0|1|2|3|4}]).
If you're using SQL Server 2000, RedGate have a free tool called SQL Log Rescue.
EDIT: Documentation for DBC LOG:
(1) (2)
Please refer to SQL Docs & look for OUTPUT clause (that you can use with UPDATE/INSERT to get the affected records).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177564.aspx
SQL Server Profiler will allow you to track hits to the database in real time. You can set filters on a number of properties to ge the output you need.