Introduction to SQL Server 2008 Management Data Warehouse (MDW)

Presented to fwPASS on February 22, 2011

Management Data Warehouse

System consisting of a one or more collectors (Performance Data Collector), a management server (MDW), and reports.

What is a Management Data Warehouse?

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MDW

Server 1

Server 2

Server 3

Server 4

Server 5

Physical Warehouse Data Warehouse

Database consisting of tables of data and access functions

1. Database

2. Tables

3. Data records

4. SSIS

5. stored procedures/views

6. Flat files/Agent job, Sproc/SSIS

7. Reports

Building that consists of racks or aisles of products

1. Warehouse

2. Racks

3. Lots of products

4. Forklifts for racking products

5. And picking

6. Trucks for transporting To

7. And from warehouse

What is a Management Data Warehouse?

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• Baselining

• Performance Monitoring

• Performance troubleshooting• I/O

• CPU

• database growth

What is it used for?

Schemas

• Core

• Snapshots

• Custom Snapshots

• Sysutility (Utility Control Point)

Security Roles

• mdw_admin

• mdw_reader (read-only view of reports – *msdb exception)

• mdw_writer (collection set upload to MDW)

MDW components

• Disk Usage (collect and upload every 6 hours)

• Server Activity (every 60 seconds, upload every 15 min)

• Query Statistics (every 10 seconds, upload every 15 min)

• Custom

Data Collection Sets

Performance counters

DMV’s

SQL Trace

T-SQL

Data Providers

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• How many servers? 100+

• How much space? 400Mb/day/server

• Editions? Enterprise, Data Center,

*Standard

• Backward compatibility? No

Miscellaneous

SSIS

How does the data get into the warehouse?

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• Management Data Warehouse Overview

• Disk Usage

• Query Statistics

• Server Activity

Reports offer drill-down to additional reports/information

Reports

1. Configure MDW

2. Configure collectors

3. MDW schema

4. msdb

5. SQL Agent - Jobs

6. Integration Services - SSIS packages

7. Task Manager

8. Cache files

9. Collector reports

10.MDW Overview report

Demos

Website• www.systemental.com

• www.leanprojectmanager.com

Blogs• dean-o.blogspot.com• practicalhoshin.blogspot.com

Twitter• twitter.com/deanwillson

Email• dean@systemental.com

LinkedIn• linkedin.com/in/deanwillson

Thank you!

Task Manager

Temporary Data Collector Cache

Disk Usage report

SSIS Packages

Hyper-V Server 2008

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-server-2008-performance-data-collector/

Additional Resources