Database Health Reports – Seven Hundred Downloads So Far

June 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Since the initial release of the Database Health Reports project last September, there have been over 700 downloads of the application at this point Beta6 is going strong.

First I would like to say Thank You to everyone using it so far.

Beta 6 introduced a few new features, but mostly focused on overall stability and bug fixing.

  • New Inefficient Indexes report added. Useful to find indexes that aren’t being used.
  • Scrollbar added to the historic waits report to allow for easier browsing of wait stats.
  • Overall improved CTRL-C and CTRL-A clipboard support.
  • Adding a setting dialog to consolidate some of the basic settings.
  • Added a threshold setting (to the new setting dialog) to set the threshold to search on the big clustered indexes report.
  • Added sorting to all the columns in all the grids.
  • Added the application name into the connect string.
  • Improved the call to check for updates when the application starts.
  • Adding another warning to the database overview panel for huge log files.
  • Added additional wait type documentation.
  • Improved error handling.
  • Added the update every X seconds functionality to the database connections report, this includes a setting in the setting dialog to change the every X seconds interval. If you don’t want it to update, just set it to a very large number.
  • New update interval settings for the database overview and server overview panels.
  • Adding Historic Plan Cache Hit Ratio Chart to the Historic Reporting section.

Still my favorite part of the overall product is the historic wait time monitoring. Once historic monitoring is turned, it records data about what may having been causing problems at some point in time. This way when someone make a comment like “The database appeared slow yesterday at 4:25am”, you have the ability to go find out why it may have been slow.

HistoricWaits

On June 6th I received a nice comment on the Raving Fans page. This page was set up to share what people have to say about this application. Since the application is free of charge the only thing I ask is for someone to share what they find with the application:

RavingFan1

Database Health Reports is a free application that I provide to the SQL Server community to help analyze and fix performance problems on your MS Sql Server.

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New Database Health Reports – Feature Request Page

June 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Beta 6 just release for the Database Health Reports with a few new features.

Since the I received a couple requests to add new features, so I added a page to the Database Health Reports page where people can request features, and then over time as I am able to implement those features they will get moved to the completed feature request page.  Just something new I am trying.

Since the Database Health Reports project is my contribution to the SQL community, I would love to hear what people would like to see added. There is no guarantee that I will get to all of the requests, but I will see what I can do to get to the most popular requests.

Here is the link.

http://databasehealth.stevestedman.com/database-health-reports/request-a-feature/

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Beta 6 of Database Health Reports Now Available

June 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Its here… Beta 6 of Database Health Reports.  Over the last 3 months I have been working on a number of new features, enhancements and bug fixes to the Database Health Reports Project, and today they are available in Beta 6.

new-blue-splash-ink-md

If you are not familiar with the Database Health Reports project, it is a free application to monitor SQL Servers for many server health related issues.

Download Beta 6 now.

Here are some of the new features that have been added since Beta 5.

  • Added an “Are you sure?” message to the defragmentation scripts before running them.  This also includes a preview of the script that is about to be run.
  • New Inefficient Indexes report added. Useful to find indexes that aren’t being used.
  • Scrollbar added to the historic waits report to allow for easier browsing of wait stats.
  • Add Ctrl+A support to the Query Advisor for select all on the edit control.
  • Added Ctrl+C clipboard copy support to all the grids.
  • Adding a setting dialog to consolidate some of the basic settings.
  • Added a threshold setting (to the new setting dialog) to set the threshold to search on the big clustered indexes report.
  • Added sorting to all the columns in all the grids.
  • Added the application name into the connect string.
  • Improved the call to check for updates when the application starts.
  • Adding another warning to the database overview panel for huge log files.
  • Added additional wait type documentation.
  • Improved error handling.
  • Added the update every X seconds functionality to the database connections report, this includes a setting in the setting dialog to change the every X seconds interval. If you don’t want it to update, just set it to a very large number.
  • New update interval settings for the database overview and server overview panels.
  • Adding Historic Plan Cache Hit Ratio Chart to the Historic Reporting section.

The settings dialog is one of the commonly requested features that I added to this release, first a number of refresh intervals on pages that update regularly.

DBHealth_Settings1

Next some thresholds to use on a couple reports to filter out the smaller items that may not be performance issues.

DBHealth_Settings2

A quick way to review all the database you are connected to, and to disconnect if you no longer want to monitor that database.

DBHealth_Settings3

A new report that has been added is the Inefficient Indexes, the idea behind this report is that it helps you find indexes that are taking up space, that have lots of updates, but not being used frequently:

DBHealth_Inefficient_Indexes

For the historic reporting, a new plan cache hit ratio report has been added into the historic reporting.

DBHealth_PlanCache_Historic

The historic reporting now has a new scrollbar to better browse historic queries.

DBHealth_New_Scrollar

As each beta is released the Database Health Reports application continues to grow with more features, enhancements, and better stability as more and more bugs get fixed.

When the update is release it will be announced here on my blog, on the Database Health Reports website, and I will also announce it on twitter as @SqlEmt.

Download Beta 6 now.

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Database Health Reports Beta 6 – Coming Soon

June 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Over the last 3 months I have been working on a number of new features, enhancements and bug fixes to the Database Health Reports Project. In the next day or two Beta 6 will be available.

If you are not familiar with the Database Health Reports project, it is a free application to monitor SQL Servers for many server health related issues. Recently the Database Health Reports were used on a database at a SaaS company to find waste, and based on the findings the DBA then trimmed 20% of the overall database size in unused indexes. This improved overall performance, reduced backup time, and allowed for future growth without adding new database hardware.

Here are some of the new features that have been added since Beta 5.

  • Added an “Are you sure?” message to the defragmentation scripts before running them.  This also includes a preview of the script that is about to be run.
  • New Inefficient Indexes report added. Useful to find indexes that aren’t being used.
  • Scrollbar added to the historic waits report to allow for easier browsing of wait stats.
  • Add Ctrl+A support to the Query Advisor for select all on the edit control.
  • Added Ctrl+C clipboard copy support to all the grids.
  • Adding a setting dialog to consolidate some of the basic settings.
  • Added a threshold setting (to the new setting dialog) to set the threshold to search on the big clustered indexes report.
  • Added sorting to all the columns in all the grids.
  • Added the application name into the connect string.
  • Improved the call to check for updates when the application starts.
  • Adding another warning to the database overview panel for huge log files.
  • Added additional wait type documentation.
  • Improved error handling.
  • Added the update every X seconds functionality to the database connections report, this includes a setting in the setting dialog to change the every X seconds interval. If you don’t want it to update, just set it to a very large number.
  • New update interval settings for the database overview and server overview panels.
  • Adding Historic Plan Cache Hit Ratio Chart to the Historic Reporting section.

The settings dialog is one of the commonly requested features that I added to this release, first a number of refresh intervals on pages that update regularly.

DBHealth_Settings1

Next some thresholds to use on a couple reports to filter out the smaller items that may not be performance issues.

DBHealth_Settings2

A quick way to review all the database you are connected to, and to disconnect if you no longer want to monitor that database.

DBHealth_Settings3

A new report that has been added is the Inefficient Indexes, the idea behind this report is that it helps you find indexes that are taking up space, that have lots of updates, but not being used frequently:

DBHealth_Inefficient_Indexes

For the historic reporting, a new plan cache hit ratio report has been added into the historic reporting.

DBHealth_PlanCache_Historic

As each beta is released the Database Health Reports application continues to grow with more features, enhancements, and better stability as more and more bugs get fixed.

When the update is release it will be announced here on my blog, on the Database Health Reports website, and I will also announce it on twitter as @SqlEmt.

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Working on the next beta of the Database Health Reports… Any requests?

April 26, 2013 by 2 Comments

I am currently working on the next beta of the Database Health Reports.  I you haven’t seen the program check it out at http://DatabaseHealth.SteveStedman.com.

I am looking for idea of new features to add in the next beta, and I just want to ask…. Any Suggestions?

 

Do you have any suggestions for another report or feature to add to the Database Health Reports?  Maybe something that you check on every day that you would like to see included in the database health reports?  Just post your request as a response to this blog entry.

 

If you want to Download the Database Health Reports to take a look before making a suggestion, just click here.

 

Database Health Reports program is a powerful performance monitoring and diagnostics solution that alerts administrators to health, performance or availability problems within their SQL Server environment, all from a central console.

The Database Health Reports project is provide free of charge by Steve Stedman to the SQL Server community.

 

Thanks,

-Steve Stedman

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Database Health Reports Beta 5 is Going Strong

April 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The Database Health Reports project is going strong.

Database Health Reports is a free application for monitoring the key metrics on your SQL Server. Created by Steve Stedman.

Database Health Reports Includes

  • Wait time monitoring. Once installed, keeps a historic record the database, query, program, user, and wait type.
  • Real time reporting.
    • Backup Status, Current Connections, Disk Space by Table, Identity Column Usage, Index Duplicates
    • Index Fragmentation, Long Running Queries, Missing Indexes, Queries Needing Parameters
    • One time use queries, Page Reads by Query, Page Writes by Query, Plan Cache, SP’s by Logical Writes
    • Statistics in Need of Updates, Tables with Triggers, Unclustered Tables, Unused Indexes

On March 3rd 2013 Beta 5 of Database Health Reports released, and hit a total of 400 downloads by March 27th 2013.

My favorite thing to use Database Health Reports for is when someone asks me why a database was slow at some point in the last few days, I can quickly and easily find the query or queries causing the slowdown.

Did I mention that is is free, download Database Health Reports and give it a try, you don’t even have to register or give me your email.

Here are a few screen shots from the program:

WaitsAdvisor

BigClusteredIndexes

HistoricWaitsPreview

ServerHealthPreview1

Enjoy… Just doing what I can to give back to the SQL Server community.

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