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Using SQL Server Compressed Backups

The Quick Scan report in Database Health Monitor detects when you are performing SQL Server backups without compression, when the compression option is available. This applies to Full backups, Transaction log backups and Differential backups.

Not using compressed backups? Why not?

Benefits of compressed backups

  • Faster backup time
  • Faster restore time
  • Less I/O at backup and restore time
  • Since you are using less disk space, you can keep more backups around.

There are a couple minor drawbacks, the compressed backups take more CPU, not much more, but a tiny bit more.  Also the compressed backups don’t compress very much when your database is using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).

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Database Health Monitor – Historic Waits

With the recent release of Database Health Monitor Version 2.0 I have decided to focus on of blogging about the features and benefits of the Database Health Monitor application. There are some incredibly valuable features that are often overlooked. The purpose of this blog series is to present some of the features of the product.

If you haven’t tried Database Health Monitor, you can download it at http://DatabaseHealth.com/download. It is completely free.

Historic Waits

The Historic Waits section of Database Health monitor is in my opinion the single most valuable part of the entire product. Other vendors sell products similar the Historic Waits feature for $1500 to $2000 per SQL Server instance, making it cost prohibitive for many.

The way that Historic Waits works is that it installs a small monitoring database on a SQL Server, that can be the same SQL Server you are monitoring, or it can be a separate SQL Server just to keep track of performance.

Over time data is collected in this monitoring database that allows you to then step back in time to see what was happening with the SQL Server at a specific point in time. For instance, if you have Historic Monitoring enabled, if someone comes to you and says “The SQL Server was slow and having problems at 2:00am yesterday”, you have the ability to track down what was happening at that point in time.

The main Historic overview page shows Waits, Plan Cache Hit Ratio, Page Life Expectancy and CPU Load over time.

HistoricOverview1

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Database Health Monitor Version 2 Released

After 4 years of beta and 5500 installs of Database Health Monitor beta releases in the last 2 years, Database Health Monitor version 2 is finally complete. It is no longer in beta. If you are curious about the history of Database Health Monitor, take a look at my post from earlier in the week.

Here is a preview of one of the latest reports added in the Version 2.0 release of Database Health Monitor.

Database Health Monitor Version 2

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Database Health Monitor Version 2 Almost Done

Over the last 4 years I have been working on the Database Health Monitor. I am about a week away from releasing Version 2, which will finally be out of the beta process. In preparation for the release I am sharing some of the history of this program.

In 2011 version 1 was released as a set of my favorite monitoring queries that had been formatted and made available through SSRS. As people started to try it out in late 2011 and early 2012, I quickly discovered that the process for distributing shared queries via SSRS reports wasn’t very easy for the people trying to use them. Many people quickly discovered the difficulty of installing these reports. The set of reports looked something like this.

OnetimeUseQueries

 

There were 10 reports that were linked from the top panel in the SSRS user interface. Although SSRS has some great features, it was challenging to switch database connections and monitor multiple servers.

In April of 2012 I gave up on the concept of using SSRS reports, and converted all the queries into a windows application and started enhancing the program. In September of 2012, I finally had the Beta 1 release of Database Health Reports out. It was a bit rough in the beginning, but from 2012 to 2015 through a series of almost 20 beta releases labeled names like Beta 1, Beta 8.2, Beta 10.1, and so forth I kept enhancing the program. Here is an early screenshot of somewhere around Beta 1 or Beta 2.

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