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We had the classic situation come up on a project the other day.  The recovery models on the databases were set to full and yet the backup strategy didn't reflect this.  Needless to say, we ran out of disk space on our build server.  In this case the answer was to change the recovery models over to simple.  However, I wanted to ...

Here's a little freebie from Microsoft for those of you who have the job of drawing out infrastructure diagrams of SQL Server farms. Ok that already sounds like a pretty niche market.  How about here's a little freebie from Microsoft for those of you that should have diagrams of your SQL Server Infrastructure but don't have the time... Ah ...

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 ...

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 ...