This blog post describes the demo “1 – Fatal Errors” from my Corruption Survival Techniques conference session from various conferences in 2008. The links to the scripts and databases to use are in this blog post. The aim of this demo is to show that sometimes a database is so corrupt that DBCC CHECKDB just [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
TechEd demo: corruptions fatal to DBCC CHECKDB
Posted on: November 30, 2008 5:37 pm
Conference Questions Pot-Pourri #10: Shrinking the database before taking a backup
Posted on: November 26, 2008 5:43 am
Here's a question I got from someone who attended our database maintenance workshop at PASS last week (paraphrased): I attended your pre-conference session on database maintenance and found it to be very informative. From what you told use though, I think I need to change my nightly backup procedure. I like to get my databases [...]
Finished my seminal work on DBCC CHECKDB
Posted on: November 25, 2008 6:24 pm
Wow – that was tough but *very* fulfilling. As you may know, Kimberly and I are each writing chapters for Kalen's next book – SQL Server 2008 Internals. Well, I *just* finished the DBCC CHECKDB chapter – it's 26000 words and 69 pages, describing all the algorithms in-depth and all the corruption errors that can [...]
Corruption survival techniques – useless?
Posted on: November 25, 2008 11:29 am
Now, I’m very thick-skinned and I know there are always some people in a conference session who don’t agree with everything I say (that’s human nature, and I’m totally cool with that) but this one I just couldn’t pass up mentioning here on the blog as I *utterly* disagree with the advice in that post, [...]
Paul and Kimberly TechNet Radio interview from PASS
Posted on: November 25, 2008 10:44 am
While we were at PASS we hooked up with Eric Ostrowski from TechNet Radio to do an interview. Eric's compiled a bunch of interviews from PASS into a 36 minute broadcast which is now live. Our section starts about 26 minutes in and runs to the end (but if you have time its worth listening [...]
Life on SQL Server 2008 – PASS interview with a large-scale user
Posted on: November 25, 2008 10:23 am
During the PASS Community Summit, Rick Heiges did an interview with Thomas Grohser, the Senior Database Engineer at the bwin Interactive Entertainment AG, the world's largest online gambling company. This is the private client Kimberly and I were onsite with for a week last month in Vienna before heading to Barcelona for TechEd. In the [...]
Paul Randal named Contributing Editor of TechNet Magazine
Posted on: November 24, 2008 3:02 pm
As you may have noticed, I *really* like blogging and writing about SQL Server (to the point that Kimberly jokes in our sessions and workshops that I blog so much I don't sleep…). Well, to cap off our very successful conference season, I'm very pleased to announce that I've just been made a Contributing Editor [...]
Conference corruption demo scripts and example corrupt databases
Posted on: November 24, 2008 11:27 am
This blog post explains the demo scripts and databases I've posted to cover all the Corruption Survival Techniques and DBCC CHECKDB sessions I've presented at conferences this year. There are two zip files you need to download: the example corrupt databases (36-MB zip) (and this one if you're on 2008) and the demo scripts. These [...]
Conference season over and all the scripts are posted
Posted on: November 24, 2008 10:14 am
Wow – that was a bit of a wild ride! Another conference season is over and we're in the wind down to vacation time – woooo! This has been our best set of conferences yet – if you haven't been following the blog, in the last 5 weeks, starting out Monday 10/20, we: Delivered 5 [...]
Corruption bug that people are hitting – Msg 2511 using DBCC DBREINDEX
Posted on: November 14, 2008 5:53 pm
Here's another corruption bug that people are hitting on 2005 SP2 – something I didn't know about until today. The situation is this: a table with a non-unique clustered index (i.e. so a hidden uniquifier column is created), and then rebuilt using DBCC DBREINDEX. Sometimes an incorrect query plan is chosen so the rows in [...]
TechNet Magazine: December 2008 SQL Q&A column
Posted on: November 12, 2008 11:51 am
It's really scary how quickly time flies – seems like it was just last week when I last blogged about TechNet Magazine (actually it was a month ago when I blogged about my 2008 Change Tracking article - see here). Anyway, a new issue of TechNet Magazine has just come out and this one has the [...]
Conference Questions Pot-Pourri #9: Q&A around compression features
Posted on: November 11, 2008 9:29 am
Today's post is based on a bunch of questions I've had around the various compression features in SQL Server 2008. Does turning on data compression or backup compression compress the transaction log files on disk? No. The transaction log is not compressed in any way under any circumstances. Rows from tables and indexes that have [...]
Conference Questions Pot-Pourri #8: How to move constraint indexes?
Posted on: November 10, 2008 10:38 am
It's been a long time since the last Conference Questions Pot-Pourri – in fact it was at the last SQL Connections in Orlando in April. Now we're in Las Vegas doing SQL Connections Fall – Kimberly's lecturing for an hour on partitioning so I can get out a quick post. This is a question that [...]
Corruption bug that people are hitting: Msg 8914 – PFS free space
Posted on: November 6, 2008 11:51 pm
(Posted with permission of the dev team) Here's an interesting bug that people are hitting. I found out about this while here in Barcelona at TechEd when I got roped into a discussion with a couple of Microsoft colleagues. Their customer was seeing errors like the following: Msg 8914, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 [...]
Vienna: churches and horses
Posted on: November 4, 2008 10:02 pm
As you'll have read last week, we were in Vienna all week teaching. This was Kimberly's first visit to the city (and country), I was in Vienna for a couple of weeks back in the late 1990s. We both had a lot of work to do over the weekend before heading to Barcelona for TechEd EMEA [...]
8-bit nostalgia time
Posted on: November 1, 2008 7:05 am
If anyone reading the blog was watching SQLServerCentral back in 2006, you'd have seen an email interview I did with Steve Jones while I was still at MS. In there I talk about how I got into computers and taught myself 6502 assembly-language programming on an Acorn Electron (little brother to the BBC Micro) which [...]
