Search Engine Q&A #10: When are pages from a truncated table reused?
This is a question I was sent a week or so ago – if a table is truncated inside a transaction, what protects the integrity
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
(Been a few days since I posted – had some real work to do :-) Today I'll post a few things from the queue that's been
Two weeks to go until the conferences start… I've revamped the main Upcoming Events page on SQLskills.com to list all the DBA/IT-Pro, Developer, and BI
[Edit 8/25/2013: The tool referenced in this post is no longer available.] During SQL Server 2005 development I did a comprehensive rewrite of the Books
Today I finally managed to hook-up with SQL Server MVP and Regional Director Greg Low so he could interview me for his podcast show –
There’s been some discussion over on the SQL Server Central forums about database mirroring performance, and one question in particular on how to do index
Thanks for your patience and to all those who emailed to let me know. All the SQLskills.com blogs have been updated to the latest dasBlog
After posting last week about a BACKUP feature that I don’t like (WITH NO_LOG – see here), I thought I’d do a quick post this
All the razzamatazz about new releases go on about what's new but hardly ever is there discussion of what's been removed. So that's the topic
This has come up several times over the last few days, and is something that Kimberly and I discuss (and deplore) when we lecture –
It gives me great pleasure to announce two new additions to the SQLskills team – Stacia Misner and Simon Sabin. Stacia’s a BI expert who
As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the new features for database mirroring in SQL Server 2008 is log stream compression. There’s a
It’s not like me to post on security – that’s one of Kimberly’s areas – but this is an interesting example of a real-life injection attack
This is another question that came up on the Disaster Recovery forum on MSDN. Paraphrasing – ‘ I have a backup file containing full backups
Lots of people have been asking for us to create some aggregate feeds of the various blogs on the SQLskills site – well, now I’ve
Over the years I was in the Storage Engine team I saw a lot of concern on the various forums about the ghost cleanup task.
It’s common knowledge that SQL Server copes with daylight savings time (DST) correctly so why should you care? Well, it’s not so common knowledge that at
Here’s a really interesting question that was in my search engine logs yesterday – if I have a transaction that runs and completes while a backup
Here’s an interesting question I was sent by my friend Steve Jones over at SQL Server Central – will a single CPU with dual-cores perform
Whenever I’m discussing index maintenance, and specifically fragmentation, I always make a point of saying ‘Make sure the index is being used before doing anything
With the November 5-9th SQL Connections conference in Las Vegas around the corner, Shirley Brothers, the Connections Conference Manager, would like to start planning the
I’d like to kick off the Indexes From Every Angle series this evening by re-posting some articles from my old blog. Both of these topics
Are you coming to SQL Connections in November? If you are, and you’re coming to either of our interactive sessions, we invite you to send
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