On Tuesday we had a look around our customer's data centers here in Austria – hidden away in the labryinthine bowels of a very large building in Vienna. Typical data centre with a halon fire extinguishing system but exceptional in its neatness and organization. The star of the show was their new HP Superdome – [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
High-end backup compression numbers
Posted on: October 29, 2008 8:36 pm
New minimally-logged insert functionality in SQL Server 2008
Posted on: October 28, 2008 1:26 am
During early SQL Server 2008 development, the Storage Engine team introduced additional minimally-logged functionality. And then it was removed again for RTM. Now it seems that they've bowed under customer pressure and have made the functionality available again (see Sunil's announcement here). Using trace flag 610 in the RTM build, you enable the potential for [...]
Planning a backup strategy – where to start?
Posted on: October 26, 2008 11:13 am
It's been almost exactly a week since the last post – an unusually long time for me. Kimberly and I were teaching the first week of the inaugural Microsoft Certifed Masters SQL course last week in Redmond (a little intense at 8 hours of *teaching* per 10-hour day – so no energy for blogging afterwards). [...]
Sparse columns: misleading info in Books Online
Posted on: October 19, 2008 3:30 pm
The sparse columns feature in SQL Server 2008 is generating lots of interest from people looking to deploy extensible schemas. I've seen a few questions from people that are confused by some of the info in Books Online, particularly about adding and removing sparse columns from a table. There's a section in BOL that states [...]
Reminder of why hardware redundancy is a good thing
Posted on: October 19, 2008 2:59 pm
One of our customers (and friends!) sent us this last week – a stark reminder why hardware redundancy is a good idea! The controller card in one of his servers literally blew up at 7.15am Tuesday morning. Although they didn't have redundant hardware, they were back online by 9am – pretty good going. Funnily [...]
SQL Server 2008 Internals available to pre-order on Amazon.com
Posted on: October 19, 2008 9:54 am
Very exciting! The SQL Server 2008 Internals book we're working on with Kalen is now available to pre-order on Amazon, ahead of the planned publication date of February 18th next year. I'm neck-deep in the Consistency Checking Internals chapter right now – its shaping up to be about 100 pages on its own! There's [...]
TechNet Magazine: Article on Tracking Changes in Your Enterprise Database
Posted on: October 14, 2008 4:01 pm
The feature article on SQL Server 2008: Tracking Changes in Your Enterprise Database I wrote for the November issue of TechNet Magazine is live on the web. It also includes a 5 minute long screencast I recorded where I demo the change data capture feature. You can get to the article at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc987538.aspx. The topics covered are: The [...]
Admin: Blog engine has been updated
Posted on: October 14, 2008 2:04 pm
Thanks for your patience while our blog engine back-end was updated. You should find that the response time is much better now. You'll notice that all the blog post URLs have changed – we have a conversion layer in place so all prior blog posts will be seamlessly accessible through their new and old URLs. [...]
SQL Server 2008 FILESTREAM whitepaper published on MSDN
Posted on: October 10, 2008 4:35 pm
Just found out that the 25-page FILESTREAM whitepaper I wrote recently for the SQL team has been published on MSDN. You can get it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc949109.aspx. Enjoy! Here's the table of contents. Introduction Choices for BLOB Storage Overview of FILESTREAM Dual Programming Model Access to BLOB Data When to Use FILESTREAM Configuring Windows for FILESTREAM [...]
Admin: Our blogs are moving to a new engine 10/8 – 10/10
Posted on: October 6, 2008 10:15 pm
Just a quick post to say that all our blogs and the SQLskills.com website is moving to a new software backend this coming Wednesday through Friday. All the URLs and links will remain the same after the move, but there may be some short periods during that time that the blogs won't be available. No [...]
Photos and stories from our Scotland trip
Posted on: October 4, 2008 12:54 am
I finally got to take Kimberly to Scotland in September and show her some of the country where I was brought up. After spending 10 days teaching in England, Dublin, and Edinburgh, we had another 10 days left of vacation. After spending a day sight-seeing in Edinburgh we headed over to my home town of [...]
