Investigating locking and deadlocking with %%lockres%%
I’ve just read a very good, very deep, and very interesting blog post by James Rowland-Jones. In the post, James investigates some locking issues using
I’ve just read a very good, very deep, and very interesting blog post by James Rowland-Jones. In the post, James investigates some locking issues using
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
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
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
[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 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
Every so often (well, ok, very frequently) my internal list of ‘I must blog about that’ gets too big and I have an almost
Way back at the start of me blogging here I wrote a comprehensive description of ghost records and the ghost cleanup process – see Inside
After writing the FILESTREAM whitepaper for Microsoft, I’ve had lots of questions about the structure of the FILESTREAM data container. The FILESTREAM data container is
Whenever I teach a class I’m amazed at the number of DBAs who don’t know about instant file initialization. Without wanting to redo blog posts
This question came up in a class I was teaching a few weeks ago: given that the variable-length column offset array in a record only
Wow – today is all about new content. As if I haven't already blogged about enough stuff to keep you reading through next week, the
Over the last few weeks Sunil Agarwal (from the SQL Storage Engine team) has posted a great series of blog articles about tempdb and the version
(Posted with permission of the dev team) Here's an interesting bug that people are hitting. I found out about this while here in Barcelona at
Very exciting! The SQL Server 2008 Internals book we're working on with Kalen is now available to pre-order on Amazon, ahead of the planned
In the last few classes I've taught, we've discussed the on-disk structures where everything is stored in a database, and I've also been asked privately
(Quickie post #2 while it's Kimberly's turn to lecture this morning…) Greg asked a question regarding the script I posted to examine buffer pool contents (paraphrased)
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
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
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
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 –
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
In a previous post (see here) I debunked a myth about how much transaction log a full backup would include. I had a question
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
This is a question I was sent a week or so ago – if a table is truncated inside a transaction, what protects the integrity
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.
I mentioned this in my Anatomy of a page post – its a common misconception that records in an index are ALWAYS stored in the
This is a combo from some previously posted material, with some more DBCC PAGE output thrown in. IAM pages An IAM (Index Allocation Map) page
This one’s a quickie. In the previous post I explained about database pages – their structure and some page types. Now I’d like to explain
Next up in the Inside the Storage Engine series is a discussion of page structure. Pages exist to store records. A database page is an
Time for the first post in the Inside the Storage Engine series. I’m going to focus on SQL Server 2005 in this series and I’ll
This week I’m going to post a bunch of info on the basic structures used to store data and track allocations in SQL Server. A
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