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
As many of you who follow our blogs (and we’ve met at conferences) may know, Kimberly’s Dad has been very ill for some time. On
This is a question that comes up a lot – how to run consistency checks on a VLDB? We’re talking hundreds of GBs or 1
It’s been a very tough couple of weeks for us with back-to-back conferences in Las Vegas and Barcelona. Now we’re in Zurich for a few
On the last day of SQL Connections a couple of weeks back we did a 20 minute TV interview with Steve Wynkoop of SSWUG. Apart from
Here’s a question that came up yesterday in our chalk-talk on database mirroring at TechEd IT Forum that Kimberly and I talked about this morning (here
In my previous post on interpreting DBCC CHECKDB output, plus in my DBCC Internals session at TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona yesterday, I mentioned there
This is a subject I posted about last year on my old blog but it came up at SQL Connections last week several times so
One of the sessions we did yesterday at IT Forum was an Instructor-Led Lab on database snapshots, an Enterprise Edition feature of SQL Server 2005.
Last week at SQL Connections someone said that CHECKDB’s output is ‘useless’. Given that I wrote CHECKDB for SQL Server 2005 I was only mildly
(Oops – deleted this by accident – re-entering it.) Day 1 for us here in Barcelona was pretty tiring. After flying in from Seattle on
I’m in the middle of a flight from Washington D.C. to Zurich on the way to Barcelona for TechEd IT Forum and I can’t sleep
This is a question I was asked multiple times over the last week: the Microsoft guidelines for database mirroring say not to mirror more than
In one of the sessions Kimberly and I taught this week at SQL Connections, we discussed how to choose efficient data-types – I’d like to
A couple more questions from the last couple of classes. Q1) Why doesn’t performing an index rebuild alter the fragmentation? A1) Here are the possibilities
This is a question that came up yesterday in our Disaster Recovery class so I’m typing it up in between attending sessions at Microsoft Day
Sitting here in our Disaster Recovery class at SQL Connections and Kimberly’s on till lunch so I’m banging out a quick blog post covering the
Quick post this morning before this gets knocked out of my head by the Disaster Recovery session we're doing today at SQL Connections. This came
As promised, here’s the first of the grab-bag of questions we were asked during conferences. I’m blogging a selection of the stuff I noted down. These
After all the build-up over the last few weeks (putting finishing touches to decks and demos), we’re finally off to the last set of conferences
This is a quick answer to a question I was sent today by someone who’d read Kimberly’s partitioning whitepaper – Partitioned Tables and Indexes in
There’s a well known problem that every time a backup operation succeeds a message is written into the error log and Windows event log. If
I’ve been involved in a few conversations today that have highlighted some big misconceptions about how backups work. I’d like to use this blog post
Ok – this post is a little strange and fun. I was thinking about word length and how it relates to designing software/schemas to support
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