Awesome SQL Tools

Attended Wardy's SQL talk this morning about SQL Server 2008 consolidation.

Many reason's to consolidate not least that you can save on SQL Server license fees.

A few very handy tools emerged that were suggested for use when determining if consolidation is appropriate but could also be used when investigating performance problems and tuning SQL Servers.

The first is Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit here. This tool does more than just document your SQL instances. Good option for an IT audit document.

The other tool specific to SQL Server performance tuning is SQLIO (Disk Subsystem Benchmark Tool) here.

This tool places you SQL Server under artificial load to stress the IO subsystem under configurable circumstances. You can simulate reads and writes, specify the number of threads to use, specify the io queue length, specify random or sequential writes and more.

Random writes simulate inserts and updates where as sequential writes simulate log file writes.