SQL Dev Tips for Small Workstations How to develop SQL on small dev workstations when prod is huge. Kevin Kline and Aaron Bertrand SQL Sentry

Agenda We’re giving you three speedy and useful tips in the next few minutes that will make your development efforts more realistic and representative of production-like environments. 1.Mimic Production Behavior 2.Proper Handling for Caches 3.Observe Behavior Changes

Dev workstations are usually nothing like production: 1.Build representative data when you can. 2.Build a stats-only database (a.k.a. db clone) for smaller dev environments 3.Ensure important settings are the same. 4.Simulate equivalent hardware: DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF. First - Mimic Production Behavior Demo: Mimicking Prod

Code to clear the caches*: Clear dirty pages: CHECKPOINT Clear the plan cache: DBCC [FreeProcCache | FreeSystemCache | FlushProcInDB( ) ] Clear the data cache, when needed: DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS Second - Proper Handling For Caches

Code to set measurements: SET STATISTICS [TIME | IO] SET SHOWPLAN [TEXT | XML] or Graphic Execution Plans Code for Dynamic Management Views (DMV) checks. Query info – sys.dm_exec_plan_attributes, sys.dm_exec_sql_text System info – sys.dm_os_performance_counters, sys.dm_os_wait_stats Query info – sys.dm_exec_requests Index info – sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats, sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats Third – Observe Behavioral Changes Demo: SQL Observations

Summary Three steps to achieving production-live behavior in a small SQL Server development environment: 1.Mimic Production Behavior, via DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF. 2.Proper Handling for Caches, via DBCC cache controls. 3.Observe Behavioral Changes, via SET statements, SSMS, and DMVs. Get the demo scripts at _________________. Q&A: Aaron Kevin