Re: Dead Zune Club

On 12/10/2011 1:58 AM, Mike wrote:
> P.S.  I'm now using SQL Server for the first time.

I haven't used SQL Server very much over the past 3 years, and they 
changed the management tools fairly significantly from what they were 
like in the Query Analyzer days when I was more familiar with SQL Server.

I've been asked to investigate an issue of "slowness" in the database at 
a client's site, wherein stuff that takes 15 minutes to run on the 
weekend takes over 2 hours during the week. So there seems to be some 
load issue, although my (possibly quite wrong) intuition about the load 
on the server is that it's not that great.

Starting from nothing, how would you go about diagnosing issues of 
slowness? I was thinking I'd just press Ctrl+Alt+Esc and manually keep 
an eye on the CPU/Memory via Task Manager, although there is probably a 
better tool out there for graphing CPU/Memory load as it changes over 
the course of a day. I was thinking that I'd also run the profiler, and 
then try to figure out which bits of software in the organisation were 
using the database, and how they were using it. I don't yet have a 
complete inventory of all the software that uses the database, but I 
figure it's probably best to try and collate a list of apps. Then I 
guess I'll try to see what I can see in the source code of any of the 
apps I identify (I don't think we have source code for all apps) and try 
to find things like "not using the connection pool", or "long running 
queries", etc.

Would be very happy to hear how others would approach this problem, and 
any suggestions for tools that might be useful would be appreciated too.