Last month I ran a blog series on the different Tools that CSS uses for certain troubleshooting scenarios SQL Server related issues. There were 12 posts that covered the use of different tools like Debug Diagnostic, XPerf, tools from Sysinternals, SQLDIAG, SQL Nexus and some debugging tips.

Now it is time to do a SELECT [PostURL], [Summary] FROM [TroubleshootingSQL].[tblBlogSeries] WHERE [Series] = ‘Tools Tips and Tricks’…..

Post#1: Tools Tips and Tricks #1: Process Monitor – Some best practices to be followed when capturing Process Monitor traces to ensure that the data collection doesn’t causes additional performance issues.

Post#2: Tools Tips and Tricks #2: SQL Express RANU instances – Explains how to connect to SQL Express Run As User Instances (RANU) using existing tools.

Post#3: Tools Tips and Tricks #3: Custom Rowsets using SQL Nexus – Another quick tip on using SQL Nexus to import outputs of .sql scripts used to capture diagnostic data using Rowset Importer.

Post#4: Tools Tips and Tricks #4: RML Utilities – Some helpful tips on the use of RML Utilities which is used by SQL Nexus under the hood for importing SQL Profiler traces into a SQL Server database.

Post#5: Tools Tips and Tricks #5: SQLDIAG and RANU – Explains how to capture diagnostic data for SQL Express Run As User Instances (RANU) using SQLDIAG.

Post#6: Tools Tips and Tricks #6: Custom Reports in SQL Nexus – A quick tip on how to create custom reports for SQL Nexus a tool widely used within CSS for analyzing performance diagnostic data collected from a SQL Server instance.

Post#7: Tools Tips and Tricks #7: PsExec as parent and ProcMon as child – Explains how to use PsExec (a tool from Sysinternals) to launch a process remotely and capture data. In this example, I have used Process Monitor as the remote process.

Post#8: Tools Tips and Tricks #8 – Debug Diagnostic and Crash Rules – A walkthrough on using Debug Diagnostic tool for capturing crash dumps and analyzing them using the Crash Analysis rule.

Post#9: Tools Tips and Tricks #9: PSSDIAG Configuration Manager – Explains how to configure PSSDIAG collection using Configuration Manager GUI with a few tips and tricks on tweaking the XML configuration file.

Post#10: Tools Tips and Tricks #10: Caching PDB files locally – Explains how to cache symbol files locally using CDB.exe.

Post#11: Tools Tips and Tricks #11: Debug Diag and Memory leaks – A walkthrough on configuring Debug Diag for tracking memory leaks for a program which can be extended to tracking non-BPool allocations for SQL Server.

Post#12: Tools Tips and Tricks #12: XPerf, Memory usage and much more – A walkthrough on how to use XPerf Heap allocation tracking for identifying memory consumers for a program. Can be extended to SQL Server Out-of-Memory (OOM) issues for non-BPool memory crunch.