Quite often when I am staring at my SSMS I wonder what is going on under the hood in my SQL Server. I often want to know which database is very busy and which database is bit slow because of IO issue. Sometime, I think at the file level as well. I want to know which MDF or NDF is busiest and doing most of the work. Following query gets the same results very quickly.

SELECT DB_NAME(vfs.DbId) DatabaseName, mf.name,
mf.physical_name, vfs.BytesRead, vfs.BytesWritten,
vfs.IoStallMS, vfs.IoStallReadMS, vfs.IoStallWriteMS,
vfs.NumberReads, vfs.NumberWrites,
(Size*8)/1024 Size_MB
FROM ::fn_virtualfilestats(NULL,NULL) vfs
INNER JOIN sys.master_files mf ON mf.database_id = vfs.DbId
AND mf.FILE_ID = vfs.FileId
GO

When you run above query you will get many valuable information like what is the size of the file as well how many times the reads and writes are done for each file. It also displays the read/write data in bytes. Due to IO if there has been any stall (delay) in read or write, you can know that as well.

I keep this handy but have not shared on blog earlier.

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)