- Hosts: Steve Stedman / Mitchell Glasscock / George Stedman
- Topic: The new release of Database Health Monitor Version 4
- Recording Date: August 20, 2026
Stedman SQL Podcast Sn 3 Ep 14 Database Health Monitor Version 4
Database Health Monitor Version 4 is here, and it’s one of the biggest updates we’ve ever made! In Season 3, Episode 14 of the Stedman SQL Podcast, Steve Stedman, George Stedman, and Mitchell Glasscock take a tour through what’s new in Database Health Monitor Version 4. This release includes 11 brand-new reports, more than 100 rebuilt or refreshed reports, improved navigation, advanced data visualizations, expanded documentation, and new tools for troubleshooting SQL Server performance.
We discuss some of our favorite new and redesigned reports, including TempDB Consumers, Connections, CPU Schedulers, Recovery Exposure, VLFs, Linked Servers, and the Migration Planner. We also look at improvements such as auto-refresh, dark mode, Control+K report search, redesigned server overviews, heat maps, tree maps, and better ways to visualize what is actually happening inside SQL Server.
Version 4 also introduces Azure SQL Health Monitor, a standalone monitoring application with more than 60 reports specifically designed for Azure SQL Database. It is included with the existing Database Health Monitor license at no additional charge.
Watch Episode 14 Now
Podcast Transcript
Steve Stedman 00:16
Hey everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Stedman SQL podcast. This is season three, episode 14, and I’m your host Steve Stedman. And today I’m joined by George and Mitchell, developers on the Database Health Monitor project, and team members at Stedman Solutions talk about Database Health Monitor version four. Welcome, George and Mitchell. Hey,
George Stedman 00:42
thank.
Steve Stedman 00:44
I’d like to also welcome our listeners to the podcast. This is the 14th episode of this season, or our 58th episode since starting the podcast. Thanks everyone for joining. Database Health Monitor version four has just been released, and we have some big surprises for you. We’ll dive into some of those today. But first off, we have dozens of new reports. Almost every report in the system has been rebuilt in some way. We have help help pages for every single report, user manual with over 600 pages, and a second new product added in called the Azure SQL Health Monitor, but before we get into it, what’s your favorite new feature, Mitchell?
Mitchell Glasscock 01:28
Mine’s going to be that TempDB consumers report. If we want to pull that one up real quick, this one is kind of a combination of something that we’ve had sitting in the temp DB database level for a while, but it’s it’s never been as deep and as comprehensive as what this one shows, and I like it because a lot of times when I’m troubleshooting, I find that bouncing between instance reports, looking at maybe if I’m noticing like an I/O, a little bit of an increased I/O, I don’t want to jump all the way down to the temp DB level to see if it’s affecting maybe something in temp DB is affecting why this disk is freaking out. And it’s a great way to just look at what’s going on in temp DB. So it’s it’s a much more in depth, comprehensive breakdown. And I like that it auto refreshes too. That’s a cool new feature that’s spread across a lot of our reports. Is that you don’t have to keep hitting F5 and you don’t have to refresh on your own. This will auto refresh, or you can stop it to take screenshots, or you want to save it off somewhere. But yeah, that’s a big overview of my favorite report.
Steve Stedman 02:39
Very cool. I will not argue with you on any of those items. All right, George, what’s your favorite report?
George Stedman 02:46
I like the wow. You’re typing it in before I even said it, but I like the new revamped connections report. The connections report has been in Database Health Monitor for a long time, but it’s always just been a basic data table with not a whole lot of information, not a lot of ways to connect the connections and figure out what’s actually how everything’s connecting in, and with the the new report, it’s just a whole lot more informative of like what is doing what? Like you can see that, like oh, this one integration is using this connection, or this this user is being used by like three different applications to make the connection, which isn’t always what you want. And this one also auto refreshes and has just a lot more fun graphs.
Steve Stedman 03:40
Yeah, cool. All right, I would definitely also agree with you on that one too. But my favorite is CPU schedulers, and we’ll take a look at this one. What this one does, and if you’ve ever heard me talk about load and tuning and all that, we always see the wait type of SOS scheduler yield, and I’ve always explained well that refers to the SQL schedulers, but we’ve never had a real good way of showing that. And what this does is, I’ve got 10 cores on this system, and it’s showing that here’s all 10 of them, zero through nine across the top, and here’s what the load is, and here’s how much is waiting on each CPU scheduler in order to get things done? Now, this is a pretty light load we have on the system right now, but if there’s too many things waiting on each core, well, that’s an indication that maybe you’re using too much CPU or maybe you need more cores. So this also shows the overall CPU pressure over time. One thing I’m going to check on: I’ve got query loading ramp running in the background, putting some artificial load on this server. All right, that covers our top favorites here. And now a word from our sponsor: Is your. SQL Server slowing down your business, slow queries, bottlenecks, and unexpected issues eating up your time. Introducing Database Health Monitor, the powerful tool built by our team at Stedman Solutions. Get real-time insights into performance with over 100 built-in reports, index analysis, wait stats tracking and proactive alerts quickly diagnose and find problems before they impact your operations. With an easy-to-use interface for DBAs and developers, monitor unlimited servers, tune queries, and keep your databases running healthy and fast. Download a free trial today at databasehealth.com and take control of your SQL Server performance. So I guess jumping into this, then talking about we’ve been keeping this a secret for a little while, and we’ve been doing work on this, but we haven’t been sharing a lot of it. We haven’t even shared it with some of the internal team members besides those of us working on it. One of the things I really want to point out here is this is version four. It’s the largest release the product has has ever had, I would say, and it is now available. And what do I mean by the largest release that it’s ever had? Well, it’s certainly bigger change and more stuff going on than we had in the version three release, which was pretty big about a year ago, and everything before that, I mean, was just little releases along the way. I mean, even the very first version 1.0 was way less substantial than what we’ve done here in version four. One of the big things is that we really focused on these is that a report should really answer the question you opened it to ask, and a lot of the time you would open it, open some report, and you’d see a pie chart and a grid, another pie chart and another grid, and it didn’t always give you what you needed in order to be able to find what was going on there. So every report has been redesigned. I don’t know if we even have a single pie chart left. I hope we don’t. There might be one or two, but I’m really trying to make sure we don’t have any. And every one of these is the new reports is there to try and present more information so you can know what’s going on to be able to make make the right decision going forward.
Mitchell Glasscock 07:24
Yeah, I don’t think there’s been a single report that we haven’t touched, updated, or isn’t at least on the list to be updated in the update following version four. Version four is what do we say? Over 170 new combination of reports.
Steve Stedman 07:45
Yep, yep, for sure. So one of the things that I wanted to talk about was the version bump. We were, I mean, originally I had not planned this as version four, and we were having a conversation, and I think it was you, George, that made some comment on our management call about, well, are we going to bump the version to version four? Do you remember that? No.
George Stedman 08:10
It’s pretty fuzzy. That was a, I mean, that was like months ago.
Steve Stedman 08:14
Yeah. My
George Stedman 08:15
brain doesn’t go back that far.
Steve Stedman 08:17
All right. So the idea here is that we started working on this, and then we just realized-I don’t know-it was maybe a more memorable moment for me than it was for you. But somebody asked the question of, “Well, why are we going to still call this version three? Because this is so different. We need to bump the version to version four. It’s that significant. This isn’t us just bumping the version because the calendar rolled by another year, or anything like that. We’re bumping the version here because this is a significant release.
Mitchell Glasscock 08:48
Yeah, one of the at the time of recording this, we’re still working on some internal testing prior to release, but we’ve sent it out to users, and the resounding feedback is everything looks different, and it’s that’s a great point of because everything looks so much better. It was a great way to call it version four. That’s I think when we realize like, hey, this is such a big visual overhaul. We need to roll it out to version four. It’s bigger, better, and looks great.
Steve Stedman 09:20
Yep, and one of the things that I found that was really hard around working on version four or working on version three updates while version four was still going on was, I mean, we have put up put out a couple version three releases lately, and it always felt like we were jumping in a time machine and going back to like the 1990s on the look of the program compared to how it looks now, and having to jump, flip back and forth between version three and version four while working with clients and working on updates and all that really, I don’t know. It just pointed out to me how big of a difference this really. Is so. Let’s go into some of the numbers here before we get into any real single report. I know we cheated with three of them in the beginning of our favorites, but overall, the shape of the release. There are, and I think this number actually changed a little bit from when we wrote it, but 11 brand new reports. I think there’s actually a couple more than that, and these are reports that are doing things that version three never even tried to report on, or never even asked, or never even tried to present. There are over 100 reports that have had complete rebuilds or complete refreshes. Now, this isn’t just a a makeover where we went in and changed the colors by any means. Although we did do that, that was a help. But over 100 reports that existed previously as a plain grid or an older pie chart or a chart that just looked plain bad, and these have all been completely redone into a whole new look and feel that we’ve never seen before in the product. What about some of the other things on the list here, Mitch or George? You want to talk about some of those?
Mitchell Glasscock 11:15
One that we’ve we’ve been asked for in the past, and we’ve we’ve kind of had it in the product in the top right. If you’ve seen it, there’s a little blue icon. It’s our help link that’ll go to go to our website, and from there you can read about what a report does and what the kind of the questions that we’ve shaped it to answer. But now, shipping with version four is our own user manual that you can look through. It’s it’s over 600 page document, dives into every single report, and answers all of those questions instead of having to jump in the the help page every time. So it’s that’s a pretty big one that we’ve been asked for for a while now, to include the other difference relating to that too is previously
Steve Stedman 12:04
the help pages, when you click that help icon, would link off to the website, but now they link link to a local help system, so help files. So if you’re running on a system with no internet access, you can still get all the help that you need in order to understand the reports. And then another thing that we’ve got, and this was this is an important one. We’ll get into more detail on it, but it’s automated crash sweep testing, which means before we do any release, we can run the current build across every version of SQL Server 2008 through 2025, and access every single report and confirm that everything actually works, and that’s something that we used to do as a automated manual kind of thing. We’ll get into a little bit more detail on that later. And then a new product, Azure SQL Health Monitor, still covered on the same license, but we found there were several times I tried to integrate Azure SQL Database monitoring into Database Health Monitor, and it just didn’t fit. The structure isn’t the same, and so what we came up with is a whole new standalone product with over 60 different reports to give you different perspectives on what’s happening with your Azure SQL Database, following the same style and the same type of stuff that we normally cover in Database Health Monitor. Overall, we’ve had 975 commits and 4,461 files changed as part of this release. That’s a pretty significant change.
George Stedman 13:41
Since we’re talking about numbers with all these new reports and stuff, I think another one of my favorite revamps in version four was, I think between version two to three to four, we keep adding reports, and I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but that instance report menu has just been kind of struggling along, and I like the way we’ve reorganized it to kind of. Oh, you’re blowing it up. We’ve reorganized the instance report menu to kind of clarify where each report fits in different troubleshooting sectors. So, like it organizes all the performance-based ones into the performance one. It puts the blocking one into the blocking one. Like it, it, it just, it helps you find stuff faster. And then that combined with the overall search functionality that we added in the top left there, it just lets people that are less familiar with our 59 or 50. Do we have 59 total reports? Is that what?
Steve Stedman 14:48
59 total instance reports. Yes, but there are also on each instance report there’s several different views. So it might be that there’s four different. Reports for what makes up one of those 59 reports.
George Stedman 15:04
Yeah, and just the ability to navigate these better, but also like if you’re if you’re not familiar with the reports, finding them when you need them without the knowledge of what exactly each one does is is a lot easier for people that are maybe newer to the product.
Steve Stedman 15:23
Oh yeah, and it used to be that we had about 12 instance reports, and then we grew it to about 20. And would always tell people where I’m trying to show them how to get there. Find that area in on the middle of your screen with all the gray buttons, and in those gray buttons, find the one that says I/O by Drive or whatever it may be. And it was, I don’t know, I it worked, but it wasn’t a great way of doing it. So, like George pointed out here, we have this whole new instance section, but we also have this search that he also mentioned. If you hit Control K anywhere in the application, it brings up this search bar. And if I know that I was looking at a report yesterday with blocking, but I don’t remember exactly which report it was. I can just search on blocking and see, oh, blocking tree, blocking queries, blocking by hour of day, and these are all on Modern SQL Enterprise 2025, which is the test instance I’m actually connected to. But it’ll also show me them on other servers that we can jump to and take a look. So I can just go blocking queries, and there we go. That’s the queries that are blocking at this point. Rather than trying to remember where was that button, just hit Control K and you’re on it. Just whatever you’re looking for, just type it in there, and you’ll find it. Hopefully. So moving down, I guess. Yeah, the the easiest way, and I think one of you mentioned this, that some of the early adopters have been trying it, and they’ve described it as, “Gee, it really looks different. And I think that’s the easiest way to describe this: is it looks different, but that’s actually the least interesting thing about it. I think is that yeah? It looks different. It looks more modern. Ports are flashier, I think. And but the thing is, every but every report that’s been rebuilt has been rebuilt with a reason that basically getting it so that we could tell a story instead of a pie chart that showed connections. We could look at different connection screens. All the so anyway, with that, I mean the big thing here is it’s not just a refresh. It is a complete rewrite on almost all of the reports. Yeah.
Mitchell Glasscock 17:33
the The initial feedback that I’ve gotten is that everyone’s very excited to see the visual changes, and that’s something that like every almost every program out there kind of does year over year. I mean, we’ve seen management studio, for instance, 22 looks way different than management studio. What was it like in the previous version?
George Stedman 17:53
Yeah, 2022 had a big facelift. Yeah, I think we kind of took that and we’re like, maybe it’s about time to update our stuff too,
Mitchell Glasscock 18:01
right, right. But then we took the core. We’re like, okay, so we did a visual, a UI change. We’re like, okay, this looks really great, but the back end of all the reports still kind of look the same. Like it, it still tells the same story. So then we started being like, well, how can we make these reports tell the story that we’re really trying to do, and we’ve kind of already gone over it with the the connections report and all the pie graphs that we used to have. But it it truly is when you look at the connections report, George. Like you said, it it shows you what’s coming from where and who’s using it, and it’s just so much more meaningful beyond. Oh, it’s it looks better. It’s it’s something that we can take and show. I mean, if we’re working with a client, and it’s easy for them to digest, it’s easy for us to tell the story around it. So it’s just a foundational shift that we’ve done with Database Health Monitor.
Steve Stedman 18:58
Yep, for sure. And with that, it’s not just that they’re prettier charts; it’s that they’re more informative charts. Yeah. So, for instance, tree maps are now weighted by cumulative share rather than whatever was being used before, and they have information about what they’re weighted on. Bars are split, so query burning CPU and a query parked on a lock no longer look identical. The heat maps draw much better, so you can determine what’s going on. And grids say what they’ve found. We’ve got dark mode throughout. Right click to copy on any chart, and it just goes on and on with the features there. But one thing I want to point out here before we go to the next section is that the licensing has been extended. If you’re listening to this and you think, “Oh, gee, I tried Database Health Monitor last year; it wasn’t for me, and now I have my 30-day trial is extended. I can’t try it again. Well, we’ve extended the licensing to anyone who’s previously tried Database Health Monitor. You’ll either get an additional 30-day free trial, or through the end of October. 2026, whichever gives you a longer, longer trial period. Okay, so let’s jump into a couple of the new reports then, and take a look at this. One of them is the recovery exposure report. Right place here.
Mitchell Glasscock 20:22
That’s a subsection of the backups, I believe, or it’s a database level one. Sorry. Oh,
Steve Stedman 20:30
that’s why it’s a database level. So I got to go to the database level. So we got big stuff as my test database here, and then we’re going to go to real time, and then recovery exposure. See, I’m still learning my way around in this. So what this is showing is what we can restore and how long until we can get that back. And an example here is what you would lose and what time period you can get data back from, and how long it’s going to take to get that restored. So if we look down here and we look at one of these, we can double click or right click and script this restore, and it will give us a full script of what we need to be able to go and do that restore to that point in time, in order to save a lot of time there. This one is a whole new chart. We had nothing like this before. How about if we take a look at the migration planner?
Mitchell Glasscock 21:29
That one’s cool. That one’s one that we’re going to be using a lot with upcoming migrations, especially now that 2025 is starting to become a bit more mainstream.
Steve Stedman 21:38
Yep, and I think in the old version, I think this was called like the upgrade planner, and really all it did was it extrapolated your current sizes of like temptb, your data, your log files, and all that, and gave you a little report that said, based off of this size, this is where you need to go in the future. We certainly have that functionality in here, but there’s so much more to it. Like, what do we need to do about migrating security and keys, for instance? Now that’s an item that’s blocking until we come up with a plan. And again, this one is a bad example because we’re currently on SQL Server 2025, and there is no version of newer version of SQL Server at the time we built this. But if we do something, well, let’s just go off script here and jump around over to SQL 2017 and look at the migration planner here. It’s migration from 2017 to SQL Server 2025, and yeah, we’ve got details here about what we’re going to need, what’s going to need to move. So like right now, it’s showing that everything is on the e drive, and to do proper layout of putting data log and tempdb on different drives, here’s what it’s proposing. What we need to do to be ready, security and and keys, version and editing, all these things we have to do, and then the cut over, kind of what do we need to do to make sure it happens? And yeah, that’s that one is is a huge improvement over what was there before. I guess in the list of new reports, are there any other ones that you guys want to show? Based off
Mitchell Glasscock 23:11
of the our last podcast, the availability groups instance report is a pretty fun one. It is,
Steve Stedman 23:17
but I am not connected to an AG in this demo environment I’ve got going right now, so that’s a not a good one to show. I’d have to actually click out to a client availability group to show you that one right now, and I’m not going to do that on the podcast.
Mitchell Glasscock 23:31
Just take our word for it. I like it.
Steve Stedman 23:33
Yeah. Yep. All right. So there were so many old reports that were stale. I, for lack of a better word, we’ve been using that a lot on was we’ve been doing this. But things like link servers. If you anyone remembers the old link servers report, it was simply a grid that just said here’s the two or four or seven or whatever link servers you’ve got. But check this out. Here’s the new link servers report. It shows you from this instance, it has link servers off to all of these different locations. Oh, gee, it tells us we’re connected to those as SA. Maybe that’s a bad move. We can look at the reach. It shows what we’re going to surface. This is showing that for each of these other three link servers, data access is on, RPC is off, remote logging is off, all all the different settings. Way more powerful than anything we’ve been able to do before with the link servers report. It’s actually really, really interesting here. And things like okay, there’s three that are wide open with a stored credential, which means anyone in the server can jump over to that other server as full permissions.
Mitchell Glasscock 24:42
Looking at the the surface report, if if we’re if someone’s reading through this report and maybe they don’t know what the RPC out or the remote login, what it means for that to be off. Going into the the manual does the. Start covering stuff like that for us.
Steve Stedman 25:02
Great question. Let’s take a look at that. So I hit the help button. Here it brings up the local help file directly linked to the link server page, with a link to an online reference for it as well. And here it gives you details on all the views, the topology, the reach, the surface, the history. Shows you the light mode view and the dark mode view, depending on which one you prefer, and then it gives you details about what everything, what’s needed, what things mean. You specifically asked about the surface.
Mitchell Glasscock 25:36
This is why it’s so different too. Is the depth? I mean, each one of these views has so much to what it’s showing, based on just looking at this help alone is crazy.
Steve Stedman 25:50
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so the help file is definitely way more in depth than any help that we’ve ever provided before. So there should never be a a question of well, what does this mean? Well, I guess I say if there is a question of what does this mean on a report, just hit that little help icon on the little book up in the corner, and it will directly load it up locally quickly there as well. You know, while we’re on help for a minute, since we took the walk down that way, let’s take a look at. We also have user’s guide, which has been downloaded, and that opened up on my other screen. So I’ll bring it over here, but it is a 600-page PDF file. Oh, I’m wrong. Yeah, 745-page PDF file. Now it’s been growing as we’ve been working on it. That basically covers everything that there is to do and know about Database Health Monitor. So we know everybody learns differently. Some people like the online help. Some people want a book. If you really want to print this out and read it on the bus coming and going from work every day, you can do that too. So just trying to come up with things that will help everyone across the system. There, another area that’s been completely redone is the server overview.
Mitchell Glasscock 27:10
Well, we’ve added more information to it. It’s it’s the we’ve always kind of coded it as the quick down and dirty of what’s going on with the server, but right off the bat, we you can see there the CPU schedulers is different. We’ve overhauled the the instance up at the top how it breaks down the information for that. George already went over the instance reports, so I mean yes, there’s the the different visual, but there’s so much more to it that you can get at a glance,
Steve Stedman 27:45
and we’ve tried to make everything clickable with it as well. So we can see here there’s 243 sessions, 195 are blocked. Well, we can just click right on that and go to the sessions report. And here’s a little grid up top showing how many of them are blocked, and yeah, everything is just a complete do-over. All right, so let’s take a look at a couple of the new reports in detail. We’ve already looked at the CPU scheduler. Let’s look at the memory report. Memory report was just, I think, a pie chart before. That just tried to show what things were using memory, but here is a little bit different representation. Hopefully, for everyone on memory. So overall, what this report is saying is that we have 39 gigs or 40 gigs of RAM on this server. Of that, C. SQL Server is taking up 24 of it. Well, there’s a reason it’s only taking 24. That’s because I have two other test instances running on there that aren’t showing up in this report because they’re different servers. But of that 24 gigs that’s being taken up by SQL Server, 17 almost 18 gigs is cached data pages, which means that’s what your queries are running against to get data, and six gigs of that is engine memory. That’s the internal stuff that keeps SQL Server running. And then of those cache databases, we can see that there’s 17 gigs broken down as 13 gigs for the big stuff database, 2.8 gigs for TempDB, and if we mouse over here, DB Health History is taking up 836 megabytes, and other test other databases are even smaller there. So, but we can also look at how’s that rank in a in a map. We can see the blue on the left side, or left to center, is all databases. The purple is what’s being shared taken up by the SQL Server engine, and you can look and see. Okay, 1.73 gigs of plan caches, things like that. Ranked, we can see that big stuff is definitely the database that’s using the most memory, followed by TempDB and then other parts of the SQL Server engine. We are not. The server doesn’t have Mac server and memory set. That’s a test server, so we try and leave some of the things in the poorly configured state in order to be able to catch it with database auth monitor. But yeah, a lot more information here than we ever had on the memory chart from the beginning.
Mitchell Glasscock 30:20
Another one of the revamped ones that I really like is the quick scan report. That’s kind of our been our golden child of Database Health Monitor for a long time.
Steve Stedman 30:29
Oh yeah, good point. And this is one of those that was all it was was a list view before, right? Just a list, like a spreadsheet. Not even as good as a spreadsheet. But what we’re showing is what are the items that are the most critical? What are the items that are high? What are the items that are medium? And what are the items that are low? So if we look at the critical, we can say, “Oh, CheckDB has never been run. We can right click and jump to the CheckDB report and run CheckDB there if we need to. Backup and recovery. Backup files missing. Here’s a bunch of backups that have been moved or deleted off the system, and that we’re going to be unable to restore to if we need to. Yeah, very low disk space, less than 5% free disk space here as well. Quick scan report, definitely a very different perspective than how it ever looked before.
Mitchell Glasscock 31:19
I personally like how we’re we’ve recategorized everything and shown the severity in a much more when you first look at it, you can really see what’s critical. So it’s it’s much easier to be like, oh, I need to get on that sooner than later.
Steve Stedman 31:35
Yep, yep, for sure. And then another one we had the security report before, and it’s been renamed a security posture. But the security report before just spit out some HTML. Here, it’s actually breaking everything down as be as secure as possible, following all the best practices. These are the security things that you should be doing. Not compliant. There’s 17. So if we click on that, those are down below. The SA login should be disabled. Check policy. You know all the normal stuff that you go through when you’re securing a server, but it’s here as a quick way to be able to go in and find it and get more details on what you need to do to fix it. Okay. Any of the other? So I should say at this point, we’re going to do another podcast in a couple weeks on a really deep dive into instance reports, and another one on a deep dive into database reports. But we’re just trying to give a quick overview today. Another one, I guess, I want to jump into is the whole historic monitoring piece on historic weights. This is one that I built in version one of Database Health Monitor, and I was using some chart controls that were maybe a little bit more ugly, but there were a number of things around it, and it didn’t look great. But what we’re what we’ve got here is more information that we can drill down and see, like more detail about what things are specifically waiting on. So most of what this server is waiting on is CX sync port. And if we look, there’s some locking in there as well. I think that was when I was running some kind of a load test, but just a revised chart with a little bit better functionality, more usable scroll bar here, and able to jump around and things like that. So, another one, I guess that I want to jump into is the VLFs report. I know, Mitch, you built the original VLFs report. I did. Yeah, it was pretty cool at the time, but the rebuild of it, I think, is even even better.
Mitchell Glasscock 33:41
There’s history behind it too, because previous to having that original VLF report, we’ve been using what you had made was a SQL script that showed a visualization of how VLFs are just in a query output, though, and that was great. And then we decided, hey, let’s put it in database health monitor, and so we did. And previously, it was just a bunch of it was a bar chart that it worked. It showed how big the VLFs were, and you could scroll through it. And if you had a bunch of VLFs, you had to scroll really far. But now we’ve transformed it into you have your one log file as a ring, and each one of these sections in that ring is one of your VLFs that exist inside of your log file, and it shows when you you can hover over them, and I’m going to jump to a
Steve Stedman 34:27
different database because that this is a better example. The other database was being completely slammed right now for a load test, so they were all being shown as in use.
Mitchell Glasscock 34:36
So this one, it’s it it shows that we have what 10 VLFs, and those first four there are really small in comparison to the other six that are sitting on here. All of them in the green are currently set and it’s set internally as reusable. When the log file cycles over, all of these will be reclaimed by the internal mechanism and be. Use to fill out, but at a glance, it’s just easy to see. I think I don’t know. I keep saying at a glance. That’s kind of been the the mantra of version four is at a glance everything is awesome.
Steve Stedman 35:15
Well, right, and the key is we want to make it so it’s not just here’s a pile of data. We want it to tell a story, so you can look at this and see. Gee, I’ve got some green there that tells me that there’s reusable log, as compared to the previous one we were looking at that did not have reusable log because it was all in use at that point and needed to be backed up in order to be able to use it again. Yeah. Anyway, it’s all here, trying to make things easier to use with that.
Mitchell Glasscock 35:40
I like the bar chart. There’s still a there’s a there’s still a bar style in the strip overview.
Steve Stedman 35:46
Yep, yep, and yeah, we can mouse over it and see and go down here. We can still do the things we used to be able to do, like shrink file and shrink it down to a certain size from here. Obviously, the end of this one is in use, so that one can’t be shrunk any smaller than it is.
Mitchell Glasscock 36:02
And a lot of the reports you can click on if they have bars or sections, you can click on them, and it will tell you in the list view down below where that section is. So it’s a great way to, if you need the raw data from the list view, it’s a great way to be like, oh, I see this. Where is it at?
Steve Stedman 36:20
Yep, and hopefully that’s showing up on the video that when I click this, they get highlighted down below. Yep, and and when you click it down below as well, it highlights in the upper ring grid as well, and that’s pretty common on many of the reports that we that we have here. Well, one thing I just wanted to jump into because we could probably go for four hours on this podcast, but we’re not going to do that to you. What we’re going to do is talk a little bit about documentation and all the documentation that we’re showing. So, for instance, this here with the screenshots and all that. One of the questions that we get is, how do we keep the documentation screenshots up to date with the program? Because we’re always making changes to the program, and if you look at the old website, everything was fairly out of date, and you could see four years old version of screenshot. So what we’ve done in this version is we’ve made it so all the screenshots that go into the documentation are automated. We run a parameter on database health monitor that says run through every one of the reports and dump out all the screenshots so that we can use it in the program, and then every release, the documentation and help files all get updated with the most recent screenshots. So you’re not looking at anything there that’s stale or out of date. So I think that wraps up what I want to cover on database health history this for today. But I want to just do a brief SQL, the Azure SQL Health Monitor.
Mitchell Glasscock 37:46
Before we jump over to the the SQL Azure Health Monitor, can we also just say if you’re interested in being one of the early testers, if you want to be an early tester and join the early testing group, you can reach out to us. Let us know, and we’ll be we’ll include you in the mailing list for early testing these preview releases that we send out.
Steve Stedman 38:06
All right. So this is the Azure SQL Health Monitor. Right now, I’ve got it connected to a single Azure instances instance, and in here we have reports and things similar to Database Health Monitor. We’ve only got about two minutes to show this. We’re going to do a whole episode. Our whole next episode is going to be purely on Azure SQL Health Monitor, but we can go and look at like how is our cardinality estimation accuracy, which will help determine are things running well. We can look at things like query feedback and intelligent query processing, T-SQL anti-patterns and code smells. I mean, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. We can look at storage. How are we looking on table hotspots and query coupling, table storage and index overhead? I mean, just all kinds of information here that’s not pointed to a SQL Server instance. This is pointed to an actual Azure SQL database in order to be able to help you as an administrator or as a developer be able to find the things that need attention and be able to tune those to get the most value out of that Azure SQL database. So one of the questions that’s come up is why is the Azure SQL Health Monitor a different product? Well, everything that it does is so different than what connecting to a SQL Server instance. Some of the reports might look similar, but the underlying foundation is completely different for talking to Azure than to an Azure SQL database and how it works. Because you don’t have things like MSDB available. You don’t have things like that.
Mitchell Glasscock 39:36
Azure DB is it’s it’s kind of a similar foundation, but it doesn’t function the same way as a standalone SQL Server. So we had to really reimagine this, but that’s why we decided to include it as a together release. Is weird way of saying it, but yeah, it’s a it’s two products that we’ve released side by side to support developers. And DBAs out there running.
Steve Stedman 40:02
Yep, yep. So the product is available now. Anyone who’s using older version of Database Health Monitor, next time you start it up, you should get a notice that says there’s a new version available. Click that, say yes, give me the update, and you’ll get this. If you’re a previous trial user out there and you want to check it out again, everyone’s free 30-day trial has been extended, and yeah, give it a try. We’d love to hear what you think about this. And like Mitch mentioned, we do have an early adopter option where, when we’re doing big releases, that we send things out early. If you want to, if you want to be on that list, you can reach out to Mitch Mitchell at StedmanSolutions.com and get on that list, or if you want to be a guest on our show, are you interested in being a guest on the Stedman SQL podcast? If you are, just reach out to us, and we can talk about what topics, things you want to cover or talk about, anything relating to SQL Server, Database Health Monitor, or about our company. You can reach out to us at https: StedmanSolutions.com/guests, or go to the podcast page and click on the guest link. Fill out the form and find out if you’re going to be a guest on one of our future episodes. All right, I think that wraps it up. Yeah, if you haven’t seen the new version, definitely download it today and check it out. And our next episode, we’re going to dive into the Azure SQL Health Monitor that we just briefly test on and touched on a moment ago, which is included with your database health monitor license at no extra charge. And I just want to say thanks everyone for listening. Thanks, Mitchell. Thanks, George, for being on the on the podcast today. And for our closing, we have a music video that shows off some of the new features in Database Health Monitor version four.