Importance of choosing the right architecture and SQL Server Edition
Last week's survey was another two-fold one – when you buy new servers, what architecture to you predominantly buy, and why?; when you buy new
Last week's survey was another two-fold one – when you buy new servers, what architecture to you predominantly buy, and why?; when you buy new
This week's been a busy one on the forums and Twitter, with lots of interesting problems people are hitting. One of the things I've noticed
Quickie this morning to start the day off. I saw a question on a forum: if I *have* to use a GUID and *must* have
Go to www.wordle.net/create and enter a URL. Here's what it thinks of my current blog homepage: Cool!
I've just been setting up some of our new hardware, and wanted to do some background reading to ensure I use the correct disk partition
A sad, tear-jerky story about how a socially-inept, stay-at-home shut-in, SQL expert gets a new lease of life and finds he really does have friends out
This is a true story, and unfolded over the last few days. It’s deliberately written this way, I’m not trying to be patronizing – just illustrating
Page splits are always thought of as expensive, but just how bad are they? In this post I want to create an example to show
Hopefully all of you reading my blog already know to use the WITH ALL_ERRORMSGS option whenever you run DBCC CHECKDB (which is now the default
This week's survey is another two-parter, part 1 of which suggested by Mike Walsh on Twitter: When you buy new servers, what archictecture do you
Last week's survey was two-fold – what's the largest SQL Server database you manage, and how many SQL Server databases are you responsible for managing.
Here are a couple of videos I came across today that are very funny. The second one had me in tears laughing. Let's just say
Another quickie today. If you're using Activity Monitor in SQL Server 2008, or Performance Data Collection with the Server Activity system data collection set, then you may
This is a quick follow-on from my Misconceptions around null bitmap size post. The null bitmap is *always* present in a data record (i.e. records in
This short post is prompted by a question that came in through Twitter – I *knew* it was worth joining and spending time on it
5/11/09: Little bit of a rewrite today as it seems some people are taking what I'm saying the wrong way. Over on Ed Bott's blog,
This has come up a few times now, most recently in an email question this morning – subsequent runs of DBCC CHECKDB show varying numbers of
Recently there’s been a spate of people noticing strange behavior from active transactions when DBCC CHECKDB (or any of the other DBCC consistency checking commands
I'm starting a new series called 'Misconceptions' – a series of short posts that debunk some of the many myths and misconceptions that exist about
Jason Massie posted an interesting statistic yesterday – Facebook has 1.5 petabytes of image storage, and it grows by 25TB daily – I wonder how
Last week’s survey was on what kind of backups you take, along with the recovery model used (see here for the survey). Here are the
In one of our visits to Bangkok this year, we toured the Imperial Palace. I uploaded a bunch of photos to Facebook of statues that
The June 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
Here's an interesting bug that was just recently fixed, and someone actually hit it today, so it's time to blog it. Bottom line is that
(Thanks to David Baffaleuf for pointing this out to me) Ever wanted to know a bit deeper how memory works in your laptop or servers?
I was in a discussion earlier today, and it's one I've had lots of times in the past – both inside and outside Microsoft and
People are saying they can't find me – that's a Twitter issue with indexing. Here's the direct link: http://twitter.com/PaulRandal and Kimberly's at http://twitter.com/KimberlyLTripp
After being mercilessly pressurized by many people (and I blame Jason Massie the most), I've joined Twitter and I'll be commenting lots on it. Why
In this week's survey I'm interested in what kind of backups you take, and also what recovery model you mostly use. If you have multiple
A couple of weeks ago I kicked off the latest survey, on what the physical layout of your databases are and why you have them
Finally! All those customers out there who are frustrated by not being able to turn on the 'lock pages in memory' option to protect the
[Edit 2016: This trace flag is required in all version of SQL Server up to and including SQL Server 2014. Every instance of SQL Server
In this trip to India (teaching for MS again) we're in and out, with no time for sight-seeing, but there's always time for bird-watching! I
In my previous posts on FILESTREAM I discussed the directory structure of the FILESTREAM data container and how to map the directories to database tables and
A short post to start the day (in India) and then at lunchtime I'll do how it works: FILESTREAM garbage collection. This is a question
Every so often (well, ok, very frequently) my internal list of ‘I must blog about that’ gets too big and I have an almost
Last week I kicked off a survey about the physical layout of your databases, based on database size. I'm running it for two weeks and
This feels like a bit of a strange post for me to make, but I want to make it anyway, and don't take it the
Not much to do here in Tokyo while waiting for the Bangkok flight except read and blog, and I've already done enough reading for one
Microsoft's popular performance troubleshooting whitepaper has been updated for SQL Server 2008. You can download Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2008 at http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/B/D/DBDE7972-1EB9-470A-BA18-58849DB3EB3B/TShootPerfProbs2008.docx. I've
At the last few conferences I've presented at, there have been questions about using SSDs (Solid-State Drives) for enterprise storage and whether that will change
This week's survey is a little more complicated. I'm interested in the physical layout of your databases. I've got four surveys, for a variety of database
Last week's survey was on how *you* manage the size of your transaction log (see here for the survey). Here are the results as of 4/10/2009
See http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=66ab3dbb-bf3e-4f46-9559-ccc6a4f9dc19 for the download, release notes, etc
This is a hilarious video of what Facebook would be in real-life – well worth a couple of minutes for a lunch-time laugh. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrFdOz1Mj8Q Enjoy!
In this week's survey, I'm interested in how *you* manage the size of your transaction log. I'll report on the results around 4/10/2009. Thanks! (No
Last week’s survey was on how you should store large-value character data in SQL 2005+ (see here for the survey). Here are the result as
The May 2009 TechNet Magazine is now available online, and it's the annual security issue. In there is an article I wrote highlighting 10 common
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