It’s Sunday evening. You are sitting down to have dinner with your family. Suddenly your phone rings. You want to ignore it because, let’s face it, your phone rings a lot. But you see the person calling and knowing they don’t call very often you decide to answer. On the other end of the line a harried voice tells you the words that every DBA dreads hearing:

“The server is slow.”

Many thoughts run through your head: Well of course it is, otherwise you wouldn’t be calling, right? And why doesn’t anyone ever call me to tell me that the server is running fast? And what, exactly, is meant by “slow”?

“OK, do you have any other details for me?” you ask.

“Yeah, I sent you an email an hour ago with some charts that PAL returned. Don’t you check your email all day on Sundays?”

You resist the urge to hang up and go to your laptop to examine the images that were sent. You see the following:

So, why is the server running slow?

Next week Jason Strate (blog | @stratesql) and I will be doing a presentation for the Minnesota SQL Server User Group (PASSMN). The title of the talk is “Choose Your Own Adventure: Performance Tuning”. We will walk you through a scenario not unlike the one I have outlined above. We will talk about the various techniques you have at your disposal when it comes to performance tuning and help you understand which techniques are most useful.

And you, the audience, will decide how we troubleshoot and solve the scenario presented. Life is an adventure, and at times so is performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

Think about what you would do first for the scenario above, or what a new DBA might do, or what an MCM might do. Think about how long you have before your manager decides to hire a DBA that has all the answers already. Think about what you can do to fix this issue immediately. What steps would you take? What questions would you ask? Leave your comments below.

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