Search Engine Q&A #17: Split a VLDB into filegroups or smaller databases for backups?
Here’s an interesting question that came in to our questions line (questions@SQLskills.com – no guarantee of an answer – I check it every so often): I
Here’s an interesting question that came in to our questions line (questions@SQLskills.com – no guarantee of an answer – I check it every so often): I
While I was at Microsoft, I wrote some code in the Storage Engine to very easily return all the IAM chains/allocation units (see this post
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the three tracks of the SQL Server 2008 JumpStart course that SQLskills.com taught internally for Microsoft and
The second part of our radio interview with TechNet has been released (see here for part 1). In this installment we discuss troubleshooting and manageability
(Cross-posted on Paul and Kimberly’s blogs) With the Spring SQL Server Connections show coming up next month, its time to start planning for the Fall
During the various courses I've been teaching, people are interested in how FILESTREAM performance compares with storing BLOBs in the database itself. I have some
Just over a month ago I posted on how to enable FILESTREAM in CTP-5 and the pre-CTP-6 build I was working with. Now that’s all
Wow – almost 10 days without a blog post – that must be a record for me! :-) Never fear – I'll be posting more
SQL Connections is in less than two months now and our pre-con and post-con workshops are filling up fast – checkout my previous blog post
Here’s a question that came in – what changed in SQL Server 2005 that allows concurrent log and full backups? First a little background, in
A few short notes this morning regarding the blogs and other stuff. We had a big outage over the weekend, which rather embarrassingly manifested itself
Phew – last week Kimberly and I spent 3 days teaching the ins-and-outs of SQL Server 2008 for DBAs/IT-Pros to about 130 Microsoft SQL Server
Last year I posted on my old blog about the active SQL Server team blogs. I just happened to post on February 14th and so
Almost a year ago to the day I asked a question on my old blog – how long does *your* CHECKDB take to run? Well,
After many reminders (thanks Adam Machanic!) I’ve added Conor and Simon to the two aggregated feeds over all the SQLskills.com blogs. There are two feeds:
This post is based on one from my old MSDN blog but the topic has come up a few times in recent days so I
The second post in my series on FILESTREAM (see here) deals with how to enable FILESTREAM through T-SQL and using SSMS. You can’t just create
Here’s an issue that I thought was a one-off but it just popped up again over the weekend so I want to publicize it. DBA
Now we’re back at home and working very strange hours as we deal with jet-lag. The flight back from Beijing to Vancouver was a great
In a previous post (see here) I debunked a myth about how much transaction log a full backup would include. I had a question
Well, I bet that title grabbed a bunch of people’s attention :-) In the Beijing Advanced Research Centre offices of Microsoft where we’re teaching this
This is a post I’ve been meaning to do for a while – detailing some of the problems you can run into when using database
This has been causing some problems on the various groups and forums over the last few days so I thought I’d repost this from my
A bit more traffic on the thread (see previous post here) prompted me to give my thoughts on the many sweeping generalizations that plague the
There’s been a very interesting discussion going on over at SQLServerCentral.com about whether to create multiple files for a user database because the server has multiple
This kind of follows on from my previous post about making sure you have character column lengths that can handle data from different countries (e.g. city
Microsoft has announced that the RTM date of SQL Server 2008 has slipped out to Q3 of this year. See this official blog post here.
Start of the second week in China. We flew up from Shanghai to Beijing yesterday, and just in time it seems. As we flew out
It seems like all I’ve been talking about on the forums the last couple of days is the correct order of operations in a maintenance
Well it’s the end of our first week in China – tomorrow we fly to Beijing for another week of teaching. Hopefully we’ll get to
Nothing technical in this blog post for a change, just some info about the first trip of the year for us. We’re in China for
One of the cool features of SQL Server 2008 for developers is spatial data support. There have been some great posts recently about using spatial
Despite the fact that I was in the Storage Engine, and there’s always been humorous rivalry between the Storage Engine team and the Relational Engine
Back in October 2007 I blogged about partition-level lock escalation in SQL Server 2008 (see here) and I promised to do a follow-up once
Just got an email notification of a new whitepaper from the SQL Customer Advisory Team on Database Mirroring and Log Shipping Working Together. It covers:
There’s a new whitepaper on TechNet that I’ve just come across (even though it was published 6 months ago!) called Predeployment I/O Best Practices. It’s
Quickie today as I’m preparing to speak at the Pacific Northwest SQL Server User Group meeting tonight on the MS Campus here in Redmond (my
Back in September last year I blogged about the native Backup Compression that is in SQL Server 2008 (see here) and promised to blog more
Hit another issue last night while playing with the latest CTP – VS2005 can’t cope with some of the changes in SS2008. The problem arose
I came across an interesting bug in Management Studio in the latest Katmai CTP today – when a connection disconnects from a database, SSMS doesn’t
No sooner has Fall conference season finished then it’s New Year and we start everything all over again! SQLskills (Me, Kimberly, Bob, and Stacia) is
Ok – so we did more partying than we thought so blog posts have been a little sparse this month, but here’s one to end
In the mail today I received notice that my first software patent has been granted by the US Patent Office :-) (after being filed 3.5
While we were in Barcelona we sat down with Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes from RunAs Radio to record a 1/2 hour interview on SQL
One of the cool features added in SQL Server 2005 for scaling-out a workload was peer-to-peer replication. The major drawback was that to change an
Every time we’re at a conference, we get asked whether we’re going to write any books on the kinds of things we talk about. Well,
This is a question I was sent a week or so ago – if a table is truncated inside a transaction, what protects the integrity
A quickie today to get back into the swing of things. In Kimberly's whitepaper on partitioning she discusses the 'sliding window' scenario (where you switch
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