Chapter 1. The Dynamic Management Views gold mine

Welcome to the world of Dynamic Management Views (DMVs). How would you like to fix problems on your SQL Servers with little effort? Or fix problems before they become noticeable by irate users? Would you like to quickly discover the slowest SQL queries on your servers? Or get details of missing indexes that could significantly improve the performance of your queries? All these things and more are easily possible, typically in a matter of seconds, using DMVs.

In a nutshell, DMVs are views on internal SQL Server metadata, and they can be used to significantly improve the performance of your SQL queries, often by an order of magnitude. A more thorough definition of DMVs follows in the next section.

The first part of fixing any problem is knowing what the underlying problem is. DMVs can give you precisely this information. DMVs will pinpoint where many of your problems are, often before they become painfully apparent.

DMVs are an integral part of Microsoft’s flagship database SQL Server. Although they have existed since SQL Server 2005, their benefits are still relatively unknown, even by experienced software developers and database administrators (DBAs). Hopefully this book will help correct this deficit.

1.1. What are Dynamic Management Views?

1.2. The problems DMVs can solve

1.3. DMV examples

1.4. Preparing to use DMVs

1.5. DMV companions

1.6. Working with DMVs

1.7. Summary