Inside the Storage Engine: What’s in the buffer pool?
This is a quick post inspired by a question I was sent in email (thanks Marcos!) which very neatly lets me show a DMV I’ve
This is a quick post inspired by a question I was sent in email (thanks Marcos!) which very neatly lets me show a DMV I’ve
Now this one’s sure to spark some controversy… I was checking my RSS feeds of the SQL blogs that I follow and noticed an interesting
Over the last few weeks I’ve had lots of questions about FILESTREAM performance and how to coax NTFS into scaling nicely. I just finished writing
I woke up this morning and someone had replaced my wife with someone who likes to blog :-). Kimberly’s turned over a new leaf and is
Moving databases around is pretty common, as is moving databases between servers running different Editions of SQL Server, especially during a disaster recovery situation. You
Just a bit off-topic on this one! I was sitting working on our top deck this morning when I spotted a large commerical airliner being
This is a quickie in response to a blog comment from my previous post on instant initialization: How to tell if you have instant initialization
At the user group meeting on Monday I spent some time explaining how GUIDs can cause fragmentation in clustered indexes AND in non-clustered indexes, even
There's been a spate of problems on the forums and in my inbox with people's transaction logs filling up. With the increase in "involuntary DBAs",
Yes, it’s that time again (well a little bit earlier than usual). With the Fall SQL Server Connections show coming up soon, its time to
In conjunction with our Iceland partners Miracle, we’re offering three BI classes in Iceland in September, taught by Stacia Misner. The three classes are as
While we were on vacation at the start of July we spent a week on the live-aboard Kona Aggressor II catching up on some scuba-diving.
I've had a few follow-ups on my two posts about boot page and file header page corruption – asking if its possible to do single-page
As you may already know, instant file initialization is a way to prevent data (not log) file create and grow operations having to zero-initialize the
Fresh off a week of teaching classes on the Microsoft campus, we’ve finalized some user group dates. Here’s what we have coming up: Monday August
I’m sitting here writing my next article for TechNet Magazine – this time on Tracking Changes Using SQL Server 2008 – and was fooling around
Following on from my previous post on boot pages and boot page corruption, I’ve been asked about file header pages – and I was already
While we were at TechEd in June, Kimberly and I participated in an hour-long discussion panel (Leveraging SQL Server Technologies to Build a Solid High-Availability
Now that I’ve done all the business-related blog posts, back to the good stuff to stop people complaining! Something that’s cropped up a few
Well, almost… Kimberly and I have agreed to co-author the upcoming SQL Server 2008 Internals book with our good friend Kalen Delaney. This is the
September, October, and November are going to be a whirlwind this year – after 3 weeks in the UK and Ireland in September, teaching and the San
People have been complaining that I’ve stopped blogging so much – vacation folks, vacation! Today I’ve got a few class and conference posts to get
Well, we’re just back from vacation (photo blog post to follow) and I’ve heard that the feature article on Effective Database Maintenance I wrote for the
One problem (the only one!) of going on vacation with Kimberly is that can be hard to banish SQL Server completely from conversation. Over breakfast this
TechEd US is done for another year! As I mentioned before, we did a lot of stuff but still found time to chill by the
Today I presented my brand new session Surviving Corruption: From Detection to Recovery at TechEd. I had a lot of fun putting together the demos, presenting
(I’m actually on-stage here at TechEd doing the DAT track pre-con with Kimberly – she’s on now until lunch so I’m catching up on forum problems…)
Over the last few weeks I've seen (and helped correct) quite a few myths and misconceptions about index rebuild operations. There's enough now to make
That time has rolled around again and we’re flying down to Orlando for TechEd US tomorrow – my first US TechEd since I left Microsoft.
Totally off-topic blog post this time. I haven’t blogged in a week as we’ve been in Chicago and Illinois for the memorial for Kimberly’s Father
Before I start, I want to make it clear that you can only hit this bug if you ALREADY have corruption, that it’s quite rare,
My first magazine article is in print! I’ve taken over the bi-monthly SQL Q&A column for TechNet Magazine and I just received the June magazine
So Seattle weather went from 50 degrees to 85 degrees overnight Friday and we all went from shivering to sweating! It's too hot to be
Kimberly and I were presenting at our local (Redmond) .Net Developers Association on Monday and the following question came up while Kimberly was talking about
We’re sitting here in St. Pete Beach in Florida visiting some of Kimberly’s family and having some sun-kissed R&R before heading back up to Seattle
Today’s the final day of SQL Connections proper (tomorrow is post-conference workshops). We’ve really enjoyed the conference (as usual!) and it’s been a blast answering
Many times I've been asked to do a blog post about creating Agent alerts, and given that today I demo'd it as part of our
It’s been quite a while since I wrote a blog post on a flight but I happened to be playing with a CTP-6 VPC
Here's a quickie just before we head off to SQL Connections in Orlando. On one of the internal MS forums was the question – how
Over the weekend there was a question on one of the internal aliases at MS: how can I tell what percentage of a database has
Now we’re back from Iceland and I have a week to catch up with some content development before the MVP Summit next week and then
(And this isn’t an April Fool…) I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve been made a SQL Server MVP for 2008. For the eight
(Redmond, WA: For immediate release worldwide) Today, in a surprise development that has stunned industry analysts, SQLskills.com announced a new technology for DBAs that will
Fixed now – thanks so much! Folks – a couple of people have setup their systems to refresh *all* our category feeds every five minutes
Hot on the heels of a frenzied few weeks of teaching for Microsoft and we’re off again – this time to Iceland! I’ve been wanting
This is a really interesting question that came up in the Microsoft Certified Architect class I’m teaching at present – if a database has torn-page
One of the drawbacks of not being in the SQL team at Microsoft any longer is that I don’t know about all the undocumented features
Well this one is well overdue and I’m in the middle of writing a class where I want to reference this blog post –
With training and consulting from SQLskills, you’ll be able to solve big problems, elevate your team’s capacity, and take control of your data career.