Depending on whether you are more of a developer or more of a DBA you may care more or less about this next feature. However, anyone can benefit from it. SSMS 2008 makes it very easy to crack open the Activity Monitor as there is a noticeable button right on the toolbar.
Once inside you get a few charts, as well as some tables of performance related data below. This is clearly not as exciting on my local Vista machine as it would be on a pounded production database, but you can see where the power of a tool like this could come in handy.
Each of the charts represents these metrics:
- % Processor Time
- Waiting Tasks
- Database I/O
- Batch Requests/Sec
Probably the most interesting feature to me is the Recent Expensive Queries table. This allows you to dynamically analyze the most impacting queries against your server. Since the impact can be determined by a number of factors, it allows you to sort by:
- Executions
- CPU
- Physical Reads
- Logical Writes
- Logical Reads
- Average Duration
- Plan Count
Even cooler, you can drill into the actual query itself with a right-click option:
Filed under: Performance, SQL Server, Tools
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