My company has a essential program that uses a SQL backend. The executives and important people at my company also use a program called iDashboards to view the data in the SQL database.
When I first started with this company the "essential program" was running very slow and the only fix they had to show me was to reboot the server. I am not a SQL person, but I can google with the best of them. After about a month of trying various fixes that all failed pretty amazingly I discovered the iDashboards application and learned that it is running SQL select statements against the database. It didn't take long then to find a query it was running that was locking the database out. The fix i used was to put a (NOLOCK) at the end of the statement to... well not lock the database while the query was running. This fix solved the issue and everyone loved me.
Fast forward 8 months and we have the same problem back. I am now looking to the minds on the internet to help me troubleshoot our SQL database and figure out what is causing the SQL database to come to a crawl when iDashboards is running. Surely adding (NOLOCK) to the end of each select statement isn't the proper fix for this. I don't want to put a bandaid on this problem.
So here are the specs of the SQL server
Server 2008 R2 with SQL 2008 installed on it. It is running as a VM using VMware 5.0.
The server has 4 cores assigned to it with 8GB of RAM. The database is 4.75GB roughly.
The symptoms of the issue do not throw any error messages. Instead the software hangs when users attempt to write data to the database. sometimes the wait time is a couple mins. Sometimes it can last 10mins or longer.
I can provide whatever logs you need or request. I may just need you to provide steps to pull any logs from the SQL server.