It's official! We're doing another 5-day SQL Immersion Event (our ever-popular SQL Server master-class) this year in the US! We decided to put on a class near Seattle this time as Washington is *fabulous* in August! The class will follow our regular 5-day format with our best content covering: On-disk structures: how the data is [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
SQL Immersion Event in Bellevue, WA in August!
Posted on: May 20, 2010 8:48 pm
On vacation…
Posted on: May 20, 2010 9:43 am
It's been a while since we had a vacation (and more than a year since we last went diving!!) so tomorrow we're off for a couple of weeks R&R (mostly on a live-aboard dive boat) before a run of events in Europe. During that time, we'll be completely offline – no blogging, no email, no Twitter [...]
Special one day SQL MasterClass in London June 17th
Posted on: May 16, 2010 7:43 pm
The top things YOU need to know about managing SQL Server – in one place, on one day – presented by two of the best SQL Server industry trainers! This one-day MasterClass (June 17th, 2010) will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based [...]
Bug: log file growth broken for multiples of 4GB
Posted on: May 15, 2010 7:23 pm
I was teaching an internals/maintenance/performance class for Microsoft DBAs this week on the Redmond campus and one of the students (thanks Crystal!) showed me a really strange bug that I'd never seen before. One of the things that Kimberly and I both recommend is not having transaction log VLFs be too large, with 500MB being [...]
Why LOB data makes shrink run slooooowly (T-SQL Tuesday #006)
Posted on: May 11, 2010 2:25 pm
This blog post is part of the monthly T-SQL Tuesday series that fellow-MVP Adam Machanic (twitter|blog) organizes. This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being run by Michael Coles (twitter|blog) and is on the subject of reporting – see this blog post for details. The theme of this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is LOB data so I’m going to stretch [...]
What 5 things should SQL Server get rid of?
Posted on: May 10, 2010 7:48 pm
This evening I was reading an article in The Washington Post called Twelve Things The World Should Toss Out and it inspired me to start a new blog chain about the top-5 things in SQL Server we all wish would just be removed from the product once and for all. Here are mine in order of evil-ness: [...]
Benchmarking: Introducing SSDs (Part 1b: not overloaded log file array)
Posted on: May 10, 2010 4:22 pm
In the previous post in the series I introduced SSDs to the mix and examined the relative performance of storing a transaction log on an 8-drive 7.2k SATA array versus a 640-GB SSD configured as a 320-GB RAID-1 array. The transaction log was NOT the I/O bottleneck in the system and so my results showed [...]
TechNet Magazine: May 2010 SQL Q&A column
Posted on: May 9, 2010 12:46 pm
The May edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column. This month's topics are: How to change the file locations for a user database The difference between page latches and page I/O latches Why database snapshots are not a good substitute for [...]
Benchmarking: Introducing SSDs (Part 1: not overloaded log file array)
Posted on: May 6, 2010 3:01 pm
Well it's been almost 6 weeks since my last benchmarking blog post as I got side-tracked with the Myth-a-Day series and doing real work for clients :-) In the benchmarking series I've been doing, I've been tuning the hardware we have here at home so I can start running some backup and other tests. In the last [...]
Adventures in query tuning: unexpected key lookups
Posted on: May 1, 2010 6:26 pm
I'm starting a new blog category to talk about some of weird and confusing stuff I see while query tuning. First up is the case of the unexpected Key Lookup (Clustered) in a query that looks like it should be covered. This is a follow on from the post Missing index DMVs bug that could [...]
Missing index DMVs bug that could cost your sanity…
Posted on: May 1, 2010 4:41 pm
Here's yet another reason to be very careful when using the missing index DMVs… There's a bug in the missing index DMVs that could end up causing you to knock your head against a brick wall and question your sanity. I know I did. The bug is this: the missing index code may recommend a nonclustered [...]
