Beta 2 of the Database Health Reports Released

September 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Beta 2 of the Database Health Reports has just been released.  The new Beta contains several bug fixes, and several new features.  Here is a breakdown of what is new or changed since the last beta.

New Features

Bug Fixes

  • Performance tuned the Page Reads and Page Writes reports which were having some difficulty on larger databases.
  • Fixed bug with the Plan Cache Report which was only showing data for the master DB originally, now it shows for the appropriate database.
  • Performance tuning on the Table Size Advisor dialog. There is a lot going on with this, it may take some time, but it is faster than before.
  • Performance tuning on the Fragmented Indexes Report.
  • Improved error handling on connection failures such as invalid password or a bad username.
  • Removed backup status for TempDB as this really didn’t make any sense. Why would anyone backup TempDB.

Download the free Beta 2 version and give it a try.

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Finding tables that don’t have a clustered index.

September 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Although clustered indexes are not required, and there are many cases where you should not use a clustered index, quite often clustered indexes can be overlooked when creating a table.  This is actually more likely if you are inheriting a database from someone else who didn’t know enough about indexes.  In these cases adding the right clustered index can dramatically increase performance on queries.

As part of the Database Health Reports, I have added the Unclustered Tables report to report on those tables in your database that do not have a clustered index on them.  From that point you can analyze each of those tables and determine if it should be clustered.

Take a look give it a try.   This report will be in Beta 2, which will be available for download on October 1st 2012.

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Working on Beta 2 of the Database Health Reports

September 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Beta 2 of the Database Health Reports will be available in the next 7 to 10 days as I finish it up.

There has been a good acceptance of Beta 1 so far, and with feedback here are some of the things included in the next beta.

  • Overall performance tuning, some of the reports run faster now, and some of the summary pages update quicker.
  • A new Connections Advisor was added.
  • Fixed some SQL Server 2005 compatibility issues.
  • Added a Missing Indexes report.
Here is a preview of the new connections advisor that was added for Beta 2.

Beta 2 should be available by September 30, 2012.

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It is finally here. Beta 1 of the Database Health Reports for SQL Server.

September 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

In October last year I started work on the Database Health reports project.  It started out as a series of SSRS reports that I released and updated in December 2011 to March 2012.  After that it became clear that the SSRS reports weren’t going to do what I was looking for so I started on the Database Health reports version 2.0 which migrated all the original reports into an application and added much more functionality than I had before.

Today (September 1, 2012) I have released the Beta 1 of the Database Health reports project.

Please give it a try and let me know how it works for you.  See the Database Health website for more details on this project.

Here is a screenshot of the database overview page.

Enjoy!

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