This is a question I see every so often and it cropped up again this morning so I'll use it as the subject for this week's blog post. There are several ways I could answer this: the unhelpful answer - I've got no idea. the almost-helpful answer...

Here's an interesting scenario that cropped up today. You have a database on a RAID array that failed and has zero'd out a page. How can you get the data back? There are two ways to do it, depending on the database recovery model and version of SQL...

I recently saw a newsgroup post that sort of implied that accessing data residing on read-only filegroups can save you on locking. Well, it could, but it does not. If you really want to save on locks, the whole database needs to be set to read-only. ...

Paul Randal in one of his earlier BLOGs described DBCC Page paul-tells-all and the record layout. I thought it will be interesting to show how a row looks before and after the Vardecimal storage format is enabled. So here it is Let us take a...

Have you ever tried updating a variable length column and fail? Well, it can happen if the modified row cannot fit on the page. One simple example of this as follows create table boundary (c1 char(8000), c2 char(20), c3 varchar(23), c4 decimal...