blogs.conchango.com

This one is a bit surprising. Assume you have a cold SQL Server which you have just re-booted.  The buffer cache is empty and lots of I/O requests are going to be physical. Boo! Hiss!  Down with physical I/O. Well help is at hand (if you are using SQL Server Enterprise Edition). Ramp-up is the process of converting your I/O's from page ...

Are you using multiple files? Are you set up for proportional fill? Is it a warehouse?  Are you concerned about extent fragmentation? You should be.  Extent fragmentation upsets your lovely read-ahead and results in smaller I/O. Let me explain.  When SQL Server allocates - it does so on a one extent at a time.  If multiple ...

I thought it might be fun to do series of posts on features that are exclusive to enterprise edition but that aren't significant enough in their own right to make it on to the big ticket list.  Sometimes people balk at shelling out for SQL Server Enterprise Edition without realising on what they are missing out.  So my objective is to ...

Whilst at SQLBits I heard a rather shocking statement: Over 80% of the worlds SQL Server instances are still using SQL Server 2000.  I say statement because I have had a little trawl round the web and I couldn't find anything to back this number up (or what it included or excluded e.g. MSDE could weigh heavily into this number). However, I ...

Saturday March 01 2008 was the second SQLBits conference.  This is not an ordinary conference - it's a community conference created by some of the UK's leading SQL Server practitioners. Tony, Simon, Allan, Darren, Martin & Chris put an amazing amount of effort in to organising the event and I think the result was there for all to ...

Putting all the above into one stored procedure has often been a TSQL dynamic nightmare putting together various bits of SQL strings and executing them. Looking around the web I have found various examples but not for all of what I wanted to do in one procedure. There were examples for paging, filtering and sorting but all as separate examples. ...

Today I ran into a blocker when trying to do this. Having spent a reasonable amount of time taking all of my sql statements out of the OPENQUERY argument and putting them into a string variable I then found it didn't work. The reason (from BOL) it turns out is that, and I quote; "OPENQUERY does not accept variables for its ...

I found this new article written by Sachin Rekhi on Database Unit Testing with Team Edition for Database Professionals. I think it's an excellent read.  The only thing I don't think it covers is what is not included in the product.  The most notable piece of Team System Unit Testing functionality that isn't included with DB Pro is Code ...

I recently put up a post with a unit test for check constraints validating all were defined with the NOT FOR REPLICATION option.  I thought it might be helpful to put up a post with tests for all the other object types that can have this option set. select object_id,name,is_not_for_replication from sys.foreign_keys where ...

We have recently had an internal discussion on service accounts predominantly on the subject of whether it is better to have one service account for sql server that is used in all environments or whether separate accounts should be used in each environment.  Perhaps surprisingly everyone came down on the same side (how often does that ...