We're thrilled to announce the general availability of Foglight Cloud, a transformative solution reshaping how organizations manage and monitor their IT environment. Foglight Cloud…
Once Foglight for Databases or Foglight for SQL Server has been installed, you’ll need to tell it what to monitor. Since Foglight doesn’t use any agents installed on the monitored systems, all you have to do is provide Foglight a SQL and Windows…
In this article, we will explore when and how to use the SQL PARTITION BY clause and compare it to using the GROUP BY clause.
Database users use aggregate functions such as MAX(), MIN(), AVERAGE() and COUNT() for performing…
In this article, we’ll explore the different types of SQL tables and best practices for creating user-defined tables in SQL Server.
Tables are primary objects for storing data in relational databases. To visualize a table, consider an Excel spreadsheet…
This article will explain what database schemas are, their advantages and how to create and use schemas in SQL Server.
In a relational database management system such as SQL Server, the database contains various objects. These can be tables, stored procedures…
Data is a critical asset of every organization, and poorly-secured databases are too often to blame for security breaches. This article details SQL server security best practices, as well as essential security considerations for protecting your databases…
In this article, we will cover the different methods for using the UPDATE from SELECT statement in SQL Server.
In the database world, static data is not typically stored. Instead, it keeps changing when we update existing data, archive or delete irrelevant…
In this article, we will explore using the different SQL CONVERT date formats within SQL Server.
Date interpretation varies between different countries. Suppose you have a global SQL Server database with a table that holds a specific date format. For…
If anyone had any doubts that a panel discussion where Brent Ozar and Pinal Dave would be answering attendees’ SQL Server performance questions would be a success, those were quickly dispelled during the blockbuster Ask the Experts session Quest hosted…
With the landscape of the tech industry rapidly changing, the adoption of and adjustment to application and infrastructure management presents a major challenge. As a result, companies are increasingly expanding and relying on a mix of relational and…
Why is SQL performance tuning so important to database management?
Because it can save you money big time. Bear with me and you’ll see how.
Most database professionals spend…
The pursuit of historical data and its analysis is a significant part of the functionality that Spotlight on SQL Server users have come to expect and continue to seek improvements upon. In the past, users have expressed the need for ad-hoc query capability…
Spotlight Cloud is a cloud hosted database monitoring and diagnostics application providing DBAs with diagnostic tools to quickly identify and help resolve performance issues. The Workload Analyzer of Spotlight Cloud is a very robust query evaluator tool…
I’ve been interested in weather, meteorology and clouds in the sky for as long as I can remember; which may explain why one of my favorite songs is Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”. I’ve learned that some clouds are pretty, and…
It is a foregone conclusion that performance monitoring is part and parcel of managing a database instance once it is in production. But what about pre-production? Especially when the instance itself is reaching critical phases of testing and quality…
In an earlier blog, I wrote about a company’s success with Quest’s flagship SQL Server monitoring and diagnostics solution – Spotlight Enterprise. The blog detailed a customer success story and revealed detailed use cases explaining how this application…
In Part 1 of this blog post, I review how you can get an evaluation copy and explain the various integration points from Quest’s monitoring solutions – Foglight and Spotlight Enterprise. You can find it here -> https://www.quest.com/community…
During a recent installation of Foglight for SQL/Oracle the DBA announced how excited he was to get Foglight installed because he was desperate to become a pro-active DBA and stop being a re-active one. Music to my ears!
So what was it about Foglight…
In the recent 5.7.5.50 release of Foglight for SQL Server, a change was made to the TempDB drilldown. Specifically, the Sessions tab would formerly show the current sessions, regardless of the time range selected on the dashboard. Now, it will allow you…
So, you’ve downloaded and installed an evaluation of Spotlight Enterprise. Good news…it comes with a 30-day evaluation license key! Spotlight is fully functional (not limited trial functionality). It simply expires after the 30 days. There are a couple…
One of the many ways to improve database performance is to tune SQL queries running in your environment. Two primary reasons for tuning are:
I often get asked about monitoring SQL workload that is consuming a database instance’s resources. The first question that comes to my mind is, “What is the symptom you are trying to resolve?” Are you looking to understand the root cause of compute resource…
Spotlight notifies DBAs of performance issues via triggered alarm messages. More importantly, specific actions can be taken based on these alarms, by configuring the Alarm Actions feature of Spotlight. Read our blog about Alarm Actions configuration …
As we continue our navigation of Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise and we can diagnose an alarm that triggers. Let us see what setting caused an alarm to trigger. The fact is when you start monitoring an Instance it is assigned the preset “Factory Settings…
Just the facts! Part 2
Acknowledging Alarms in Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise
Now that we have establish a view of the facts let’s see what we can do with them. Some on these alarms are set by default to be acknowledged before they will clear for…
