Performance Analyzer Resources & Convergence Recap
Thanks to everyone who attended our sessions at Convergence on Maximizing SQL Server Performance for Dynamics. Rod Hansen and I were thrilled with the attendance (177 people on Wednesday and 146 on Thursday) and we were very pleased to see that our sessions were the rated the #1 and #2 sessions in the Cross Product track and showed up on the top 10 rated sessions for both Wednesday and Thursday.
With Virtual Convergence, you can watch the video of the session even if you didn't attend Convergence. You can also download the PowerPoint from the session as well. If you'd like to learn more about the session, this is definitely the place to start. I see that just the first run of the session is available, and we touched on a number of different topics in session 2, so if there are things you didn't catch in session 1, let me know how we can help there.
Once you've had a chance to watch the session, you're going to want to download the Performance Analyzer for Dynamics tool that we discussed in the session. The tool is free to use - no licenses required. Rod recently posted an article on the AX in the Field blog on MSDN with a pointer to the latest release of the tool, version 1.16. It's helpful to read the article to learn what's changed in the new release.
As I said in both sessions, I highly recommend that customers install Performance Analyzer in all their environments and make it part of the build process. If you're live today, install it in your test or User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment and then your live environment. If you are in implementation mode, install it in your development environment and make it part of your builds, so bring it up to test, UAT and production as you prepare those environments. You may not use it much in development (although your developers could always track the performance of their code as it hits SQL there) but you'll definitely want to take a look at the data you're getting once you get to UAT. Once you put load on the system, you'll want to capture stats and start to take a look at those queries that are taking the longest to run to see if they are going to be a problem once you go live.
Other resources you might want to check out - some of which we mentioned during the session yesterday:
- Compression - I talked about compression during the first session - in the second session, there were only a few people with Enterprise Edition so I didn't get into it. This blog on our site talks about what it is and when you should consider using it.
- More Performance Analyzer Content - check out this search results page which shows you all the Performance Analyzer articles on the AX in the Field blog. There are blogs that talk about how to capture database blocking, what data management views are used and how to determine disk latency with the tool.
Let us know if you have any questions about Performance Analyzer for Dynamics as we'd be happy to help you get it installed to start to take advantage of the wealth of information that's waiting for you in this toolset.
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