Building A Performance Data Warehouse for SQL Server CPU & Disk Activity By Brian Flynn Information Technology Renaissance Man Based on presentation given to St. Louis SQL Server Users Group on 9/11/

Tools Required SQL Server RDBMS Analysis Services Excel Microsoft Paint

Capture CPU & PIO Every Minute

Calculate Deltas in a View Create a “Delta View”  One of the secrets to creating a good cube based on CPU & PIO data recorded every minute is calculating the deltas.  To match up from one minute to the next, use LoginTime, ProcessID & ContextID together.  Look out for NULLs

Analysis Services 2000 Cube I’ve used this AS2K cube design since It’s been so reliable I haven’t needed to upgrade it.

Analysis Services 2005 Cube As a proof of concept I created this design for SQL It will probably run on SQL 2008 as is. The only difference is how the time dimension is managed.

Scheduled Job(s) Single Server vs. Multi-Server Setup  Depending on if you do everything on one server or only gather data on the production server & use a separate server to process the data will determine your specific job definition(s). Gather data for 15 minutes, stop gathering, incrementally update cube & restart the gathering.

Visually Identify The Smoking Guns

Leverage Application Names in Connection Strings

Leverage Host & Usernames* *Very Useful With Integrated Authentication

Leverage Default Catalog (DB) Comparing 4 Weeks At Hour Level

PIO By Day Over 2 Months

PIO By Day Over 6 Months

Quantify The Effectiveness of Changes

How Precise & Reliable Is It? This system has run for 10 years Minute by minute resolution enables detection of brief spikes that escape traditional reports. If a connection opens, executes and closes in between polling cycles, it will go undetected.

Cost Benefit Ratio Requires minimal resources Eliminates the need to spring into action Discovers needles in haystacks! Has been useful to prove/disprove tactical configuration changes. Plan for capacity of disk subsystems.

Thank You & Good Luck! Contact me via LinkedIn if you have any questions.