Slava Oks's WebLog

Changing gears

slavao — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:15:00 GMT

You haven't heard from me in while and there is a reason. I moved from SQL Server's Storage Engine team to a new incubation team that is involved in exploring new directions in operating systems. This subject area has been always very fascinating for...(read more)

Q and A: Ratio between AWE Allocated and VM Committed/Reserved in DBCC MEMORYSTATUS output

slavao — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 04:02:00 GMT

Q: What kind of ratio should you expect to see between AWE Allocated and VM Committed/Reserved? We are running 8GB with a cap of 7GB in the max server memory and yet the VM Committed is around 100MB. I was first shocked to see that the sqlservice in task...(read more)

Q & A: I am running on 64 bit and all of my tasks are waiting on SOS_RESERVEDMEMBLOCKLIST, What is going on?

slavao — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:29:00 GMT

This wait type represents waiting on multi page allocations inside of SQLOS's memory manager. As you remember from my description of memory manager's working internals, it has two major allocators single page allocator, SPA and multi page allocator, MPA...(read more)

SQLOSDMV's Continue

slavao — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:26:00 GMT

sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks One can run lots of interesting queries using this view. You can even use this view to perform deadlock detection that is not resolvable by deadlock monitor, DM. For example if you have tasks waiting on external resources such...(read more)

Q & A: Does SQL Server always respond to memory pressure?

slavao — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 23:39:00 GMT

Q: I thought I've seen reference recently to problems with SQL2005 not releasing memory when under pressure, and this was possibly due to the Lock Pages In Memory option. We have a server where this seems to be happening, i.e. SQL2005 uses all available...(read more)

SQLOS's DMVs Continue

slavao — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 05:22:00 GMT

sys.dm_os_schedulers Q. Do I need to by more CPUs? In order to answer this question you have to find out if your load is really CPU bounded. Your load is really CPU bounded if a number of runnable tasks per each scheduler always greater than...(read more)

SQLOS's DMVs

slavao — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 02:54:00 GMT

SQL Server 2005 has a large number of DMVs that you can take advantage of especially when you try to understand behavioral characteristics of your SQL Server 2005 installation. DMVs expose enormous amount of information but how can you make use of it...(read more)

Talking points around SQL Server 2005 scalability

slavao — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:09:00 GMT

Couple of weeks ago I did a talk on SQL Server 2005 scalability. The actual talk was not about the enormous amount of features that you can leverage in SQL Serve 2005 to make your application scale but rather how SQL 2005 achieves its scalability. In...(read more)

Q & A: I can't make SQL Server 2005 32 bit version to use all memory on the machine

slavao — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:41:00 GMT

I’m currently using the RTM+SP1 x86-SQL2005 build on a server which has 32GB of physical memory. I notice that during ramp-up the memory usage (as seen under task manager) increases to about 28GB (i.e. “Available memory” reduces to 4GB) and stays there...(read more)

Set of new features in SQL Server 2005 enabled by SQLOS

slavao — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:57:00 GMT

Couple of weeks ago I had a chance to visit set of our customers and talk to them directly. It was an unforgettable experience. As a part of the visit I made set of presentations related to SQLOS and new features it enables in SQL Server 2005. I thought...(read more)