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Web Position Gold
Have for a while now owned a copy of Web Position Gold but never got round to testing it out. Would be interested in hearing comments on its usefulnes. It seemed a litle complicated on both times I took time to look at it.
Thunderbird 1.0
Mozilla released Thunderbird 1.0. I was using 0.8 and upgraded today. So far I haven't found any of the new features to be anything I'll likely be using, but I think some people will find them handy.
Blocking websites witout a server
I've been working at a high school and we're dealing with a problem. Our students are spending important time playing online games and using AIM through the web. We'd like to block certain sites, but we do not have a server. Does anyone have any suggestions on blocking certain websites? Any and all help would be appreciated.
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Recent Articles |
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Most SQL Server Configuration Settings Should Not Be Changed. In this article, we are going to take a look at some of the performance-related SQL Server configuration settings. These are SQL Server-specific settings that can be modified using either Enterprise Manager or SP_CONFIGURE.
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Embedded Databases
An Embedded database is a specific database genus that does not run as a separate process, instead, it is directly linked ("embedded") into the application. Herein, the database is integrated into the application and the end-user has little or no knowledge that the database exists.
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The best place to start your SQL Server performance audit is to begin with the Performance Monitor (System Monitor). By monitoring a few key counters over a 24 hour period, you should get a pretty good feel for any major hardware bottlenecks your SQL Server is experiencing.
Backing Up And Restoring Your MySQL Database
If you've been using MySQL database to store your important data, it is imperative that you make a backup of your data to prevent any loss of data. This article shows you how to backup and restore data in your MySQL database.
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12.20.04
Operating System Performance Checklist
 By Brad M. McGehee
Like SQL Server, Windows Server is mostly self-tuning. But like SQL Server, there are things we can do to help optimize Windows' performance.
And every time we help boost the performance of Windows Server, we are at the same time boosting the performance of SQL Server.
Selecting the Best Performing OS?
While SQL Server can run under Windows NT 4.0 Server, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003, the focus here is on Windows 2003, as it is the most current version of the operating system. If you are still using NT 4.0, see this URL for guidance. And if you are still using Windows 2000, see this URL for guidance.
If you want performance out of SQL Server, you will want to run it under Windows 2003 server. Many performance improvements over Windows 2000 and NT 4.0. Some of these include:
The ability to better take advantage of Intel hyper-threading CPUs.
Up to 32 CPUs and 64GB of RAM are now supported using Intel chips, and up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of RAM are supported using Itanium chips.
I/O path and disk I/O performance have been substantially boosted, while at the same time reducing the amount of CPU resources needed to service I/O requests.
If you have not upgraded your SQL Servers to Windows 2003 yet, do so as soon as you can. It will provide a quick and easy boost to your SQL Server's performance.
 Are the Disk Partitions Formatted Using NTFS 5.0?
If your server is new and Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 has been recently installed, then any drives that have been formatted with it have been formatted using NTFS 5.0. But, if the server is older, and previously ran Windows NT 4.0 Server, and the drives have not been reformatted since upgrading to Windows 2000 or 2003, the disks most likely were formatted using NTFS 4.0.
While there is not a lot of difference between NTFS 4.0 and 5.0, there is enough to make the upgrade worth your while. NTFS 5.0 includes some new performance enhancements, which mean fewer disk accesses to find files, and generally overall faster disk reads. Before Windows 2000 and 2003, some DBAs formatted the drives or disk arrays dedicated to log files as FAT because it had a small performance benefit over NTFS 4.0. This is no longer true under NTFS 5.0, so all disks for all SQL Server should be formatted using NTFS 5.0 for best performance.
If you currently have a production SQL Server that is using NTFS 4.0 formatted partitions under Windows 2000, it may be difficult for you to convert them to NTFS 5.0. If this is the case, I would recommend that you not worry about this, as the performance hit is not huge. But if you are upgrading from Windows NT 4.0 server to Windows 2000, you will definitely want to reformat your drives using NTFS 5.0 to take advantage of every little performance benefit you can eek out of your server.
Is "NTFS Data File Encryption and Compression" Turned Off?
NTFS 5.0 under Windows 2000 supports both file encryption and compression, and by default, these two features are turned off on a newly installed Windows 2000 or 2003 server. While these features do provide some benefits under limited circumstances, they do not provide any benefits for SQL Server. In fact, using one or both of these features can greatly hurt performance.
As you know, SQL Server is very I/O intensive, and anything that increases disk I/O hurts SQL Server's performance. Both file encryption and compressions significantly increase disk I/O as data files have to be manipulated on the fly as they are used. So if either file encryption or compression is used on SQL Server files, performance will greatly suffer.
If you become the DBA of a currently existing SQL Server, and are not familiar with it, check to see if anyone mistakenly have turned on either of these functions. If so, and you turn them off, you will become a performance hero to all of the server's users.
 Does Your Server Have the Latest Service Pack?
Every service pack I have ever seen has one or more performance enhancements. These could be because of tuning done by Microsoft, or because some previous bug has been fixed that boosts performance.
While you may not want to rush right out and install a new service pack the day it is released from Microsoft, once it has been tested positively in the real world, you should install the service pack.
Does Your Server Have the Most Current, Microsoft-Certified Hardware Drivers?
On more than one occasion, I have seen older, buggy hardware drivers cause performance problems with Windows 2000 and 2003. Most commonly, these are disk- or network-related drivers.
Periodically, you should check to see that your server has the most recent, Microsoft-certified hardware drivers. You can do this by going to the hardware vendor's website, or by using Microsoft's Update service. In some cases, you may find a new driver that is available from the vendor, but has yet to be certified by Microsoft. I recommend that you be patient and wait (assuming this is practical) for the Microsoft-certified version. While increased performance is important, software stability is even more important.
Read the Rest of the Article.
*Originally published at SQL-Server-Performance.com
About the Author:
Brad M. McGehee is a full-time DBA with a large manufacturing company, and the publisher of http://www.SQL-Server-Performance.Com, a website specializing in SQL Server performance tuning and clustering.
He is an MVP, MCSE+I, MCSD, and MCT (former). |
