At DBmarlin, we love hearing real-world stories from our partners and customers. In this case study, Chris Vandekerkhove, Senior SQL Server DBA from DBA Services company Monin, shares how DBmarlin helped him quickly identify and fix SQL Server performance problems at a multinational corporation in the global materials technology sector, headquartered in Belgium.

The company’s SQL Server infrastructure includes more than 150 servers worldwide. As you can imagine, some of these servers are critical to the functioning of the business.

The organisation already had a good monitoring system in place for typical counters such as CPU, disk usage, and network. Despite this, a lot of time was still being invested in analysing performance problems across several systems. They were using Query Store and Extended Events, which are excellent tools, but the drawback is the time it takes to set them up correctly and, more importantly, the time needed to analyse the results.

Chris explained:

“I was asked, amongst others, to have a look at the most important systems on condition that I had time to do so. There were other tasks with a higher priority and time was limited. So, to get matters started with a minimum effort, I asked DBmarlin if I could have a trial license for a couple of weeks. This was used on the most important SQL Server of the company which had plenty of performance issues. I let DBmarlin do its work and continued with my other tasks.”

After about 24 hours, curiosity took over and Chris checked what DBmarlin had found.

“With just a couple of clicks the culprits were found. To the amazement of the business-people, one of these queries was not supposed to run or at least not without a good WHERE-clause. Another issue was that there were tons of execution plans for the same query. For the other 2 queries, the graphs showed that a lot of time was spent waiting on locks. Both were update queries using a WHERE-clause on a field which was not indexed. I took a snapshot of the performance of the last 24 hours and stored it. With the approval of the business, indexes were added and the server-level ‘optimise for ad hoc queries’ was enabled as well. After another 24 hours, the performance was compared with the snapshot. The report clearly showed the drastic performance improvements which were made due to these changes.”

Later that week, another colleague approached Chris with a different issue.

“On one of their databases, performance was sometimes problematic. They had no clue what was causing this. To make a long story short, I used DBmarlin once and found out that a load process which was doing updates while at the same time a cleanup process was running caused the problem. Fortunately, this was easy to solve once more by applying the correct indexes.”

Finally, Chris received a call from the company’s team in Korea.

“Nothing had changed but the performance was quite bad all of a sudden. Once more DBmarlin came to the rescue: a complex query using views in views and user-defined functions in the WHERE-clause was causing the problem. Part of the problem could be solved by adding/changing indexes. By running the findings through AI, several suggestions came up to improve the query. These were communicated with the software vendor.”

Chris summarised his experience with DBmarlin:

“All this took me some minutes instead of many hours wading through trace files and suchlike. While traditional monitoring systems do a generally good job, DBmarlin is top notch when it comes to analysing & solving performance problems.”

Conclusion

This story highlights how DBmarlin can help uncover the root cause of SQL Server performance issues in minutes rather than hours. By combining clear visualisations, AI-powered recommendations, and deep database insights, DBmarlin makes it easier for teams to keep business-critical systems running smoothly.

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