Rendezvous With Destiny Forty-five years ago, Ronald Reagan aka Ronaldus Magnus spoke to Americans of our rendezvous with destiny . In a few short days the SQL Community will rendezvous in Seattle for the PASS 2009 Summit . This time last year, eager & anxious, I was preparing for my very first...

Greetings, my current colleague & former MVP Lara Rubbelke ( blog | twitter ) was gracious enough to invite me to speak this week at PASS Minnesota aka PASS MN . I’ll be reprising my spiel on Disk Partition Alignment , the Best Kept Secret in SQL Server I/O Performance .  For more details, see...

I recently collaborated with Microsoft PFE Daniel Janik to create a template to make the case for disk partition alignment. Perhaps your customers or stakeholders within your organization can benefit. This work was recently broadcast throughout PFE DLs as well as the April 2009 SQLRAP Newsletter . Thanks...

The purpose of this post is to document Disk Partition Alignment Essentials. It is intended for engineers who are already familiar with disk partition alignment yet want a “cheat sheet”. As most of you know, partition alignment is an essential best practice. We are seeing I/O enhancements in the...

I've spoken publicly several times this year to crowds large-&-small: TechReady 6 (an internal Microsoft conference) Indy Tech Fest ITT Commencement Last week was my first external international conference, the Professional Association for SQL Server 2008 Community Summit . This...

Background In a previous post I documented the importance of disk partition alignment as a foundation for optimal disk I/O performance. In the lab & in the field we’ve commonly found performance enhancements of 30% - 40% by a variety of metrics. Though Windows Server 2008 provides for out...

<Note: 20081119: Deck updated w/ new graphics, perf metrics, & dynamic disk info> <Note: 20090225: Deck updated & moved to skydrive > <Note: See also Disk Partition Alignment (Sector Alignment) for SQL Server: Part 4: Essentials (Cheat Sheet) > Now that SQL Server...