Chapter 38. Using PAL to analyze SQL Server performance
Here’s a common scenario for a database administrator. Someone stops by your cubicle and complains that the system is running “slow.” Regardless of whether it’s the database or the application, you’re tasked with determining what’s causing the slowdown, and you must diagnose the problem as quickly as possible. The problem worsens when the performance issue begins to impede normal business functions, ultimately costing the company revenue. Once management becomes involved, stress levels rise, and it becomes even more critical to resolve the issue quickly and accurately. Sometimes the issue is diagnosed easily, such as when a runaway process has locked a table. In other cases, the problems aren’t so obvious.
Even great applications can experience performance problems. The ability to troubleshoot and resolve these issues when they occur is critical. Monitoring Windows Performance Monitor counters is one of the first things you should do when performance problems arise. But which ones should you look at? There are hundreds of counters to potentially capture, and making sense of the information once captured is often difficult and time consuming.
