Thursday, May 26

Project Lucy

Quest Software, the kind people behind SQLServerPedia are running an experiment in cloud based performance analysis called Project Lucy.

The idea is that you can upload a SQL .trc (Profiler trace) file, and Project Lucy will do some analysis for you - analysing CPU time, durations, IO etc. There's histograms of statement durations, and the ability to filter the trace easily by picking from drop downs.

All this is of course possible by uploading your trace file to a database table (or saving the trace output directly to a table) and writing your own SQL queries. However, Project Lucy's aim is to start mining the crowd sourced data to provide comparison between your trace and similar workloads uploaded by the rest of the community.

It's an interesting project, and like SQLServerPedia it needs community support to succeed. It's useful now, but to reach its potential it needs feeding with data. I've started uploading traces over the last couple of days, and I'm finding that the analyses available thus far are useful enough to keep you interested while Quest work on extending the functionalities. Each trace file you upload is its own "analysis", and all your analyses are saved for later appraisal.

Also, they're giving away a $50 Amazon voucher each day (to US residents only unfortunately), so that's a pretty good incentive to give it a try.