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 DTA: Expected improvement 0%

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vitoco
Starting Member

22 Posts

Posted - 2007-12-31 : 11:03:42
I did a trace on a production DB for many hours, and got more than 7 million of "RPC:Completed" and "SQL:BatchCompleted" trace records. Then I grouped them and obtained only 545 different events (just EXECs and SELECTs), and save them into a new workload file.

To test the workload file, I run DTA just for 30 minutes over a restored database on a test server, and got the following:
Date                                             28-12-2007
Time 18:29:31
Server SQL2K5
Database(s) to tune [DBProd]
Workload file C:\Temp\filtered.trc
Maximum tuning time 31 Minutes
Time taken for tuning 31 Minutes
Expected percentage improvement 20.52
Maximum space for recommendation (MB) 12874
Space used currently (MB) 7534
Space used by recommendation (MB) 8116
Number of events in workload 545
Number of events tuned 80
Number of statements tuned 145
Percent SELECT statements in the tuned set 77
Percent INSERT statements in the tuned set 13
Percent UPDATE statements in the tuned set 8
Number of indexes recommended to be created 15
Number of statistics recommended to be created 50

Please note that only 80 of the 545 events were tuned and 20% of improvement is expected if 15 indexes and 50 statistics are created.

Then, I run the same analysis for an unlimited amount of time... After the whole weekend, DTA was still running and I had to stop it. The result was:
Date                                             31-12-2007
Time 10:03:09
Server SQL2K5
Database(s) to tune [DBProd]
Workload file C:\Temp\filtered.trc
Maximum tuning time Unlimited
Time taken for tuning 2 Days 13 Hours 44 Minutes
Expected percentage improvement 0.00
Maximum space for recommendation (MB) 12874
Space used currently (MB) 7534
Space used by recommendation (MB) 7534
Number of events in workload 545
Number of events tuned 545
Number of statements tuned 1064
Percent SELECT statements in the tuned set 71
Percent INSERT statements in the tuned set 21
Percent DELETE statements in the tuned set 1
Percent UPDATE statements in the tuned set 5

This time DTA processed all the events, but no improvement is expected! Neither indexes/statistics creation recomendation.

It does not seem that Tuning Advisor crashed... Usage reports are fine and make sense to me.

What's happening here? It looks like DTA applied the recomendations and iterated, but no new objects where found in DB.

I guess that recomendations from the first try with only 80 events were invalidated by the remaining from the long run.

I couldn't google an answer for this. Help!!!

Thanks in advance.

++Vitoco

tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2007-12-31 : 13:43:06
I haven't been able to get the DTA to work on any of my production databases. The DTA has always taken hours to run with 0 recommendations even though I know we've got missing indexes.

I've given up trying to use the DTA and just manually improve the database through SQL Profiler/SQL Trace, actual execution plans, and good old-fashioned manual checks.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/
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