Frequently Asked Questions

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Please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or fill out the contact form - only then we will be able to consider your request.Learn more.

Certainly. We advise you to look through the testimonials section of the website and to read the success stories. And of course, you can always use your search engine of choice to search the web.

All resource metrics are required for the analysis:

• Duration
• CPU
• Reads
• Writes
• Row Count

Qure Profiler also enables you to use any of the following dimensions:

• Application Name
• Event Class
• Batch Instance (TextData)
• Database Name
• Host Name
• Start and End Times
• Error
• NT User Name
• Server Name

You most certainly can. After you open the analysis in Qure Optimizer, press the Qure Optimizer application button (the large green Q on the top left corner of the application) and then select "Save as workbook..". Qure Optimizer will then export all of the information to an Excel workbook.

Please contact us and one of our account managers will be in touch with you to provide licensing and pricing information.

The best solution to this problem is to contact us directly. One of our account managers will then contact you and will work with you to try and find a time that will suit all parties.

Absolutely! As of version 2.5, which is currently available to download.

There are many resources available to you on our site. To name a few you have the Qure Optimizer resources section, the whitepapers section. If you prefer video, you're welcome to watch our video tutorials, or attend an online demo.

Of course. As part of our demo kit you can download and open a pre-generated full Qure Optimizer analysis. After you install Qure Optimizer you can open the demo analysis and browse through the results and recommendations. We also invite to attend a live online demo, where the capabilities of Qure Optimizer will be demonstrated against a real customer's analysis.

The installation requirements for each of the products may be found on the requirements tab in the Qure Optimizer and Qure Profiler pages accordingly. Other possible issues may be found on the limitations and known issues section.

The first resource to help you find a reseller is our partners page. If you cannot find a partner in your territory, please contact us and we will do our best to assist.

Most trace analysis tools focus on de-parameterizing statements and grouping them by template to pinpoint the top resource consumers. However, trace events include many other dimensions (or properties) of the workload that provide extremely valuable information. Qure Aanlyzer can group trace events by specific parameter values, specific hosts, or all of the above, in a multi-level hierarchy -- and that's what we call multi-dimensional analysis. Read more about mutli-dimensional analysis.

Please refer to our Contact Support page - you will find links to product resources as well as to the limitations and known issues section. For more in-depth Qure Optimizer questions, please search the user guide (in order to open the user guide, you'll need to launch Qure Optimizer, and then press the question mark image on the top-right of the welcome screen). If you cannot find an answer to your question or issue, please contact our support team directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and we will be happy to assist you.

Even though you didn't receive a link, you are indeed registered to the demo. One of our team members will be in touch with you shortly after you complete your registration. You will then receive a link to the demo's online session along with additional information.

Yes, definitely. After launching Qure Profiler, you will see on the buttom-center of the start page a link to "Open Demo Workload Analysis". If you press that link, the demo analysis will be opened in a new tab.

We recommend having enough free space to accommodate the size of the database times three. Not all of this space will be used, but since Qure Optimizer tests many different indexes, a lot of free space is required. Eventually you'll only be recommended those indexes that improve workload performance, so the production database's size isn't expected to grow by a factor of three. For a 250GB database, we recommend having 750GB of free space.

Your first option would be to contact us - our staff will happily assist you in maiing the most out of the performance tuning recommendations generated by Qure Optimizer. Second, you can watch the advanced Qure Optimizer tutorial, where our CTO and SQL Server MVP, Ami Levin, explains how to make the most out of your recommendations. And of course, we invite you to attend an online demo, where one of our team members will demonstrate Qure Optimizer using a real production workload. Durinf the online demo you will be able to ask our experts questions about the product, the recommendations and their implementation.

Qure Optimizer can help you optimize the performance of almost any database. Qure Optimizer's recommendations have proved to be extremely effective, yielding significant performance improvements, on “real world” production databases in ~ 8 out of 10 databases. About 2 out of 10 databases, experienced less dramatic improvements and in very few cases, no or very little improvement was achieved.

Our tests and careful manual analysis of these databases revealed that the databases that gained the least from Qure Optimizer's recommendations were either highly optimized to begin with or that the main causes of the slow performance were rooted in issues such as design and coding techniques beyond Qure Optimizer's current scope of analysis.

We are constantly working on expanding and perfecting Qure Optimizer's analysis algorithms with every new version to increase the scope of its analysis.

Yes. The minimal requirement is to prepare a SQL Server trace according to the provided trace template. The templates are located under the "TraceTemplates" folder in the Qure Optimizer installation folder and can also be downloaded here.

The trace should be performed long enough and at the right times to faithfully represent the full range of activities of the database applications. For more information on how to perform an effective trace, read the chapter "Preparing a Trace File Using SQL Profiler" in the Qure Optimizer user guide.

In addition, Qure Optimizer requires some prerequisite for installation such as .Net framework 3.5 SP1 and SQL Server client tools. For more details, read the chapter "Installation Prerequisites" in the Qure Optimizer user guide.

You must use a dedicated server with a restored copy of the production database for both the analysis and the benchmark processes. For more information on the analysis server, read the chapter "Preparing the Analysis and Benchmark Server" in the Qure Optimizer user guide.

Qure Optimizer’s analysis process automatically applies changes to the database and should NEVER be performed on a production environment.

It is very difficult to predict the duration of either the analysis or the benchmark processes. The duration depends on many factors, the main ones being:

• Total number and complexity of the trace file event
• Number of unique batches in the trace file
• Number of database objects
• Number of tables and the number of rows in tables
• Size and complexity of the code in the programming objects
• Resources available to the database server machine
• Resources available to the machine where Qure Optimizer is installed
• Number and type of batches and recommendations tested during benchmark

There is no definitive answer to this question.

We recommend that you perform a new database analysis at least whenever a new version of Qure Optimizer is released or when the database and/or the applications that use it have changed either in structure, code, data volumes or usage patterns.

No.

Once a full analysis has been performed (running a full analysis requires a license), you are able to view it and work with the recommendations report, the benchmark, apply and all other Qure Optimizer features. Since the license information is embedded in the analysis file (*.quan), you can even copy the file to another computer where the same version of Qure Optimizer is installed (licensed or not) and use all of its features.

Performing a new full analysis requires a new license. The same applies to a trial (unlicensed) analysis.

You need to first consider what really constitutes “performance degradation”. The benchmark provides you with 5 different parameters to measure each batch’s performance before and after applying Qure Optimizer’s recommendations. These parameters are Duration, CPU, Logical reads, Physical reads and Writes.

Since SQL Server Profiler, the tool that most database administrators use for performance tuning, does not provide the physical reads parameter, it is common for DBAs to estimate a batch’s performance by logical reads only. This may be somewhat misleading. Consider, for example, a query that joins tables A and B using a hash join algorithm. The addition of a proper index for the join can cause a change of the execution plan from hash join to nested loops. This may result in a higher number of logical reads since the pages are accessed more than once, unlike the single access patterns used in hash algorithms.Actually, the efficiency of the query may have improved significantly since these extra “logical reads” are mostly memory accesses.Although the logical reads may have increased, in most cases physical reads decrease, CPU consumption is reduced and less memory or additional IO operations are consumed since no hash tables are required.

Another common issue that can cause misleading benchmark results is concurrent activity on either the server that hosts the benchmark database, or the client computer running the Qure Optimizer benchmark, or the network infrastructure connecting the two.

Concurrent activity may delay the completion of the processing of the benchmarked batches due to disk, CPU, network or memory congestion. This may result in an increase in the measured duration of the batch. In most cases, if you see that duration has increased but other parameters such as physical reads and CPU have improved, you can reasonably assume that this is due to some concurrent activity. It is important to note that all batches are executed serially; therefore blocking locks do not affect duration.

In rare cases, applying Qure Optimizer's recommendations may degrade the batch’s performance. The two cases that we have encountered so far where this has happened are rewrites and new index creations. A rewrite that may yield significant performance improvement in one scenario can cause a performance penalty in another, depending on numerous factors, some of which are beyond the current analysis scope of Qure Optimizer. The addition of a new index may cause the SQL Server optimizer to use it in error, based on a wrong estimation of its efficiency for a particular query.

For example, a query plan that used a table scan before the addition of an index may change to use an index seek and lookup after the index is created. In some cases, the SQL Server optimizer wrongly estimates, during compile time, that a certain number of rows satisfy the query’s filters when, in fact, a much larger number of rows are returned at run time causing a severe performance penalty due to excessive lookup operations. This may negatively affect the query’s performance.

For both the above and similar cases, Qure Optimizer provides you with the accurate actual measurements of the benchmark so you can use your knowledge and skills to further reject recommendations that you find inefficient. We are proud that these cases are very rare.

If you do encounter such a case, where Qure Optimizer’s recommendations have degraded a batch’s performance, we would highly appreciate your contacting This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and providing all the relevant details so we can work on improving Qure and further minimizing such cases in future versions.