Reasons Your Query Is Slow Right Now: Changes To SQL Server Settings

You And What Change Management Board?

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I know, it sounds foolish. Trivial, even. Don’t let people make changes without permission.

But the number of times I’ve been reviewing server hardware and settings with people, and they’ve started head scratching about how something ended up the way it did is fairly astounding.

There’s almost no way to audit every since change, either.

Fun, right? SQL is fun. That’s why everyone acts like it’s terrible. We wanna keep the fun to ourselves.

Sticker Shock

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There are a lot of things that can change under the covers.

One fairly sneaky thing is if someone makes sp_configure changes without running configure, that kick in after a reboot.

Unexpected failovers, patching cycles that require reboots, and all sorts of other bump-in-the-night incidents can lead to this.

On top of that, there are just so many settings that can cause erratic performance, it’d be disingenuous of me to list them all here, even though it’d probably be great for SEO.

Instead, have a scroll through this list. See what I mean?

You’re gonna have a hard time remembering to keep track of what all your settings are now, and if they’re different in the middle of a performance storm. I don’t usually tell people to run sp_Blitz when that’s going on, but it can be a good sanity check, too.

Not all performance problems are caused by the robots. Some are caused by the humans, too.

For a general check, I’ll run it like this:

sp_Blitz @CheckServerInfo = 1;

You might be able to get to the root cause of things pretty quickly.

Thanks for reading!

Going Further

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If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that and need to solve performance problems quickly.