Fixed now – thanks so much! Folks – a couple of people have setup their systems to refresh *all* our category feeds every five minutes – this is putting an undue load on our server (and screws up our server stats). I know I post a lot but not *that* often. I’ve WHOIS’d the IP [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
RSS feed refresh – please back off a bit (Brazil and Korea)
Posted on: March 31, 2008 11:50 am
Chilling out in the Land of Fire and Ice
Posted on: March 30, 2008 12:05 pm
Hot on the heels of a frenzied few weeks of teaching for Microsoft and we’re off again – this time to Iceland! I’ve been wanting to come here for as long as I can remember but Kimberly’s already been here 3 times before. We’re teaching some seminars in conjunction with Miracle Iceland next week but [...]
Inside The Storage Engine: Does turning on page checksums discard any torn-page protection?
Posted on: March 21, 2008 11:23 pm
This is a really interesting question that came up in the Microsoft Certified Architect class I’m teaching at present – if a database has torn-page protection enabled, and page checksums are enabled, is all the existing torn-page detection lost? This is an important question, because enabling page checksums doesn’t suddenly make all allocated pages be [...]
SQL Server 2008: New (undocumented) physical row locator function
Posted on: March 20, 2008 12:25 am
One of the drawbacks of not being in the SQL team at Microsoft any longer is that I don’t know about all the undocumented features in the next release – I have to hunt around for them like everyone else :-( So I was poking about in SSMS in 2008 CTP-6 and noticed a function called sys.fn_PhysLocCracker [...]
Inside The Storage Engine: GAM, SGAM, PFS and other allocation maps
Posted on: March 14, 2008 3:31 am
Well this one is well overdue and I'm in the middle of writing a class where I want to reference this blog post – so I suppose I'd better write it!! This is an updated post from my old Storage Engine blog that now covers DIFF and ML map pages. In some previous posts in [...]
HA: Where do you start when choosing a high-availability solution?
Posted on: March 13, 2008 9:14 pm
It seems that today is going to be one of those days where I get lost in forums and blogging – I can live with that :-) One of the questions that came up on a forum today was about choosing an HA solution – based solely on the hardware that was running the database! [...]
CHECKDB From Every Angle: When did DBCC CHECKDB last run successfully?
Posted on: March 13, 2008 8:32 pm
This came up several times during the week so I thought it was about time to blog about it. One of the new features we put into SQL Server 2005 was storing the last time that DBCC CHECKDB completed successfully (called the last-known good time). What does successfully mean? This is the catch – if [...]
Search Engine Q&A #17: Split a VLDB into filegroups or smaller databases for backups?
Posted on: March 13, 2008 5:41 pm
Here’s an interesting question that came in to our questions line (questions@SQLskills.com - no guarantee of an answer – I check it every so often): I have seen demonstrations where a large database being broken down into smaller ones using synonym names. I think it was used on a data warehouse and allowed smaller database backups [...]
Inside The Storage Engine: sp_AllocationMetadata – putting undocumented system catalog views to work
Posted on: March 12, 2008 10:38 pm
It's been a long few days of building slide decks and other content and I just had to stop for a bit and take care of my internals-hacking withdrawal symptoms! While I was at Microsoft, I wrote some code in the Storage Engine to very easily return all the IAM chains/allocation units (see this post [...]
Available for download: Our High-Availability hands-on labs and SQL Server 2008 JumpStart materials
Posted on: March 12, 2008 5:23 pm
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the three tracks of the SQL Server 2008 JumpStart course that SQLskills.com taught internally for Microsoft and some MVPs – see here for details. Well, the content is now available to download! Note that this was based on CTP-5 (November 2007 CTP) and there have been *lots* [...]
TechNet Radio interview with Paul and Kimberly on SQL Server 2008 – Part 2
Posted on: March 11, 2008 11:45 pm
The second part of our radio interview with TechNet has been released (see here for part 1). In this installment we discuss troubleshooting and manageability in SQL Server 2008. You can get to it by going to the March 11th 2008 show here. Enjoy!
SQL Server Magazine Connections Fall 2008 Call For Abstracts
Posted on: March 10, 2008 9:29 pm
(Cross-posted on Paul and Kimberly’s blogs) With the Spring SQL Server Connections show coming up next month, its time to start planning for the Fall show. Once again Kimberly and I will be Co-Chairs of the Conference and we’d like to invite you to submit abstracts for the Fall 2008 SQL Connections conference, to be [...]
SQL Server 2008: FILESTREAM performance
Posted on: March 9, 2008 5:45 pm
During the various courses I've been teaching, people are interested in how FILESTREAM performance compares with storing BLOBs in the database itself. I have some performance graphs based on measurements the dev team made – these have been presented publicly by myself and the dev team so I can share them with you here. There [...]
SQL Server 2008: Changes to enabling FILESTREAM from CTP-6 onwards
Posted on: March 7, 2008 7:10 pm
Just over a month ago I posted on how to enable FILESTREAM in CTP-5 and the pre-CTP-6 build I was working with. Now that’s all changed! CTP-6 is a hybrid of the CTP-5 method and what will eventually be the methodology in RTM. The changes were made to separate the OS-level configuration from the SQL-level [...]
TechNet Radio interview with Paul and Kimberly on SQL Server 2008 – Part 1
Posted on: March 5, 2008 2:31 am
Wow – almost 10 days without a blog post – that must be a record for me! :-) Never fear – I'll be posting more over the next couple of weeks. Kimberly flew off to India yesterday to teach some Microsoft classes and unfortunately I couldn't join her this time as I'm teaching 3 classes [...]
