CREATE BLOG dbo.SqlServer

Like Reporting Services? Like SQL Server? Want to view a whole bunch of your SQL Server performance data with Reporting Services-style reports? Then you'll want to check out SQL DMVStats, a 1.0-generation open source project up on CodePlex that was just released a few days ago by Tom Davidson & Sanjay Mishra from the SQL Server Customer Advisory Best Practices Team.

I've been playing with it for about a day and I dig it. It reminds me of the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard reports that I'm so fond of (link here) but there are some signficant differences. For one, the Performance Dashboard reports is more of a pull-based reporting; i.e., you must request the report and then you can view the data afterwards. With the SQL DMVStats reporting, they use a series of jobs to track system performance and a database to store this information therefore trend analysis and time-based analysis are easy to accomplish. I think of the Performance Dashboard reports as for ad-hoc reporting and I might think of the SQL DMVStats as trend analysis; sort of along the lines of the SQL Server Health and History tool (the SQLH2).

So what can you use SQL DMVStats for? Well, here's the introduction text:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 provides Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) to expose valuable information that you can use for performance analysis. DMVstats 1.0 is an application can collect, analyze and report on SQL Server 2005 DMV performance data. DMVstats does not support Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and earlier versions.

In the docs, it is listed as a "Performance DataWarehouse"

You do have to be aware that:

1. This is first generation stuff here so, if you install it and it crashes your machine, tough cookies...
2. The default sample rate is 20 seconds therefore there is some overhead associated with running it.
   
3. The default snapshot interval is every five minutes

I could write out much more here but really I'd be just reproducing the really, really good documentation they included. Go ahead - check it out (on a test server): SQL DMVStats. Tip for first time CodePlex users: to download the file, you need to visit a particular release's page. Look at the top right corner of the page for version 1.0...

BTW, I've had a few issues here and there that I haven't worked out (such as "@object_id is not a parameter for procedure sp_GetDatabaseObjectIndexes." when I'm trying to view the index info) but I suspect it's due to my installing and playing rather than RTFM'ing!

Thanks for the cool tool :)