For all that it tries to be, I have to give the Activity Monitor a thumbs-down, or at least a thumbs-sideways. In its current form, it's just not useful enough to do DBAs much good. Not only did it take too long to give me the info I needed, but the info was so sketchy that I needed another tool to complete it. If I'm going to look at CPU, I'm immediately going to want to see memory and disk. And as long as I have to go somewhere else for those other metrics, I might as well get CPU there too. Sorry Microsoft, better luck next time.

Resource Governor

Microsoft touts the new Resource Governor as one of the biggest enhancements in this release, and there's no question it will come in handy for shops that want to keep some processes from interfering with others. For example, one of the best fits for a resource governor would be on an OLTP system where you're forced to run reports against live OLTP data. You don't want the reports to get in the way of transactions, so you would push them to a group that caps their resources.

Still, this is Microsoft's first stab at granular resource management, and while it's a nice start, it's not going to be as immediately useful as many shops hope. First of all, you can specify only two resource measures to define a resource group: CPU and memory. You can specify min and max values for each one, but that's not nearly enough to define a rogue process on a busy system. Rogue processes take many forms, and capturing them requires additional metrics (number of I/Os, amount of time, etc.) beyond CPU and memory usage.

Further, once you define a process to be in a particular resource group, it stays there. Misbehaving queries cannot be moved dynamically to a different group, as you can do in Oracle Database. In order to assign a query to a different resource group, you would have to kill the process, assign it to the group, and then restart the Resource Governor. Something tells me you won't want to do that often on a really busy system.