For those of you who were planning to register for our IE1 Immersion Event (on Internals and Designing for Performance) in Chicago at the end of April, I have bad news and good news… The bad news is that the class reached maximum capacity (30 students) and is sold out. The good news is that [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
Chicago IE1 class is sold out, so we added another one!
Posted on: February 20, 2013 10:22 am
Buffer pool disfavoring
Posted on: February 13, 2013 2:25 pm
Have you ever wondered why DBCC CHECKDB, for instance, doesn’t flush the buffer pool when it runs on a database that is larger than the memory capacity of the server? There’s cool mechanism that it uses called disfavoring. When a buffer is no longer required, the buffer can be marked as the least recently used of [...]
New online course on communication skills
Posted on: February 10, 2013 11:54 am
My latest online training course was published by Pluralsight on Friday: Communications: How to Talk, Write, Present, and Get Ahead! The course is 2.5 hours long and draws on my extensive experience communicating and mentoring people on how to communicate more effectively. It’s aimed at everyone who needs to communicate, no matter which industry they [...]
Tracking page splits using the transaction log
Posted on: February 7, 2013 11:43 am
Whenever I’m teaching about index fragmentation I get asked how to track page splits proactively. This can be useful to discover fragmentation occurring in indexes you didn’t know had fragmentation problems, without running the sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats DMV (see here for how that works) against all the indexes in your databases. Today this came up multiple times, both in class and in [...]
DBCC WRITEPAGE: an introduction
Posted on: February 5, 2013 11:45 am
SQL Server’s undocumented commands, options, and trace flags are sometimes carefully-guarded secrets. I’ve been a major secret-keeper of lots of these, having written/re-written a bunch of the undocumented DBCC commands. I’ve been assiduously avoiding writing this blog post for 14 years but now my hand has been forced. There’s one command in particular, DBCC WRITEPAGE, [...]
SQLintersection: your new SQL Server conference
Posted on: February 5, 2013 10:31 am
This is a quick post to announce that we’ve designed a cool new SQL Server conference, where we control all aspects of the show (including the speakers, the sessions, the workshops, the format, the schedule, and everything else) to make sure you get the best possible conference experience and the best possible return on your [...]
SQL Server disaster-recovery poster now available
Posted on: February 1, 2013 10:46 am
A while back I wrote a comprehensive disaster-recovery flow chart in poster form for SQL Server Magazine, and I’m very happy that it’s now being made available! Edit 2/7/13: SQL Mag pulled the poster from their site again, but you can download it from here. The poster has links to a page with more explanations [...]
