Common questions from newsgroups and forums
If you're new to the blog then you may not have seen my Search Engine Q&A series (or seen it and not realized what it
If you're new to the blog then you may not have seen my Search Engine Q&A series (or seen it and not realized what it
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
Every so often I’ll see posts on the various data corruption forums discussing causes of corruption. In this post I want to debunk some of
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
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
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",
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
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
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
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
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 a question that came in – what changed in SQL Server 2005 that allows concurrent log and full backups? First a little background, in
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
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
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
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
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
(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
This is another question that came up on the Disaster Recovery forum on MSDN. Paraphrasing – ‘ I have a backup file containing full backups
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
(Check out my online training courses: SQL Server: Detecting and Correcting Database Corruption and SQL Server: Advanced Corruption Recovery Techniques. We can also help you with
Ok – I’m on a roll today so to finish off I’d like to repost some info about database mirroring failover types (including how you
This was a question from the MSDN Disaster Recovery forum I started while I was at Microsoft. I have a 600 gig database that has
One of the great things about the blog engine we use is that it shows all the search engine queries that led to someone clicking
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