SMT 00.6.00 Released!

Dear SMT users,

We are glad to announce that a new version 00.6.00 is finally out.

We have been working on two major changes;

SMT is now synchronised on daily basis with the central SMT node to always get fresh set of checks to collect data about the events of your SQL servers. Having this type of synchronisation allows us to get other changes to SMT with a higher flexibility. This will impact the new frequency of new versions quite significantly and we are looking forward to it. There are some additional benefits from this channel, and we are already discussing how to use it for alerting.

Second change is related to the way how the data are reported. Now the application decides what is going to be a frequency based on the length of an interval the user selected. This leads to a significant increase of a responsivity of the reports.

Another group of changes are small to medium size and include all the following;

• View Query Execution Plan
• Performance counters, Memory Buffer reporting performance enhancements
• Visualize Block chains and adjust way how blocks per table are calculated
• Index usage and DB size statistics reports - resolve used data type limits at some instances
• Index Recommendation report - add support to very long column definitions
• Query search and summary report resolve possible duplicates
• Updates to Trigger reports to use properly DWH data and allow trigger name filtering
• Added support for running SMT in AG
• Update optional check for Memory requests to be able to link data better to queries in SMT
• Query compare report enhancements to get better results
• Query performance, we addeed information about affected rows - currently it is only a data extension to be used internally while required for an investigation but the report changes will follow
• Update of Index list visibility in usage reporting
• Enhance CPU load collection - consistent on multiple socket systems
  • Added detail view - currently only data collection
• Block report – huge performance enhancements especially when viewing longer intervals - tweaks around the timeline when block did not occur
• Align data retentions to 30 days for data that cannot be easily stored in DWH e.g. blocks
• Added AG login synchronisation and alerting to keep users aligned at AG nodes
• Upgrade of SQL Agent jobs history collection
• Frontend config changes to support extremely long URL parameters
• Query performance report updates to ensure the requested TOP x records are returned
• Internal SMT clean-up script was enhanced to avoid huge transactions
• New data collections for
  • Backup and Restore history
  • Added optional collection of database object statistics properties updates
• A check to cleanup execution plan cache from single used plans was enabled

We realised increase of cases when SMT is used for tuning that is why we would like to start interpreting it as Server Monitoring and Tuning. This also describes better all the plans that we do have with SMT.

Please do not hesitate to contact us in case you have any questions. Our team will also go through the changes in the release with you on a upcoming

Yours Sincerely,

Jiri Dolezalek