First blog post of the year from TechEd! Well, Kimberly and I arrived a day early hoping to chill out in the sun by the pool but contrary to all expectations the weather sucks today – it’s actually much better in Seattle. Instead we're hibernating in...

Hermann Daeubler and Sunil Agarwal have co-authored this white paper. Hermann is a Program Manager with the SQL team and is a SAP expert. Hermann was involved with vardecimal storage format team from the very beginning to guide us with the customer scenarios...

TechEd US is in Orlando this year - see here for details and here to register. We're doing a bunch of HA and maintenance related sessions - here's the list: Sunday 3rd June: Full day pre-conference on Leveraging SQL Server Always-On Technologies...

We have some job openings on the Storage Engine Program Management team - if you're looking for a great career opportunity helping to drive the product you love using, check them out. What does a Program Manager do? This blog entry by Steven Sinofsky...

ok - a little explanation is required. At the last MVP Summit here in Redmond, I met up with a bunch of the Australian MVPs, most of whom run SQL Server User Groups. I came up with the idea of doing a series of remote user group presentations from...

One evening last week I sat down with Kimberly for 5 minutes to come up with a top-of-our heads list of VLDB maintenance concerns for a company migrating a multi-TB database to SQL Server 2005. This isn't in any way based on the VLDB survey I've been...

I had a question this week from someone who'd heard me say at SQL Connections (paraphrasing) "database compatibility level is mostly about query parsing" and was having trouble trying to forcibly attach a 2005 or 7.0 database to a 2000 server. His...

I was on a conference-call on Friday with a customer and we were discussing their plan to have thousands of filegroups, with a table in each, as a way to improve recovery times in the event of a disaster (the tables are unrelated to each other so this...

I was asked this question yesterday and didn't know the answer so thought it would be good for a quick post. Can you use devices from your main and mirrored backup media sets together to perform a restore? The code below creates a single-device backup...

As promised in my earlier post of an example corrupt 2005 database, here's one I've just created for SQL Server 2000. The attached WinZip file contains a backup of a simple 2000 database called 'broken' . It has a simple table called 'brokentable'...

Whenever I’m discussing index maintenance, and specifically fragmentation, I always make a point of saying ‘Make sure the index is being used before doing anything about fragmentation’ . If an index isn’t being used very much, but has very low page...

I've been asked several times over the last few weeks for an example corrupt database to play with, and for testing logic built around DBCC CHECKDB. The attached WinZip file contains a backup of a simple 2005 database called 'broken' (I can do a 2000...

Late night blog post to round out spring-break vacation... A number of customers I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks have been making use of database or file shrink in situations where they don’t really need to. There are few recurring scenarios...

From the tools team here in Redmond: We recently posted updates to address an issue in two SP2 Maintenance Plan tasks. The KB article describes the symptoms as follows: FIX: The Check Database Integrity task and the Execute T-SQL Statement task in...

So it seems that Microsoft's email system barfs when some people try to send email with 'survey' in. And I was unclear how big a database I'm interested in. To be honest, anything over 100 GB or so starts to require careful maintenance planning. So...

It’s survey time again. I’ll be doing lots around VLDB maintenance in the coming months so I’d like to get more info from all of you about what’s happening in the field. I’ll be working on Katmai features, strategizing about Katmai+, blogging on maintenance...

While we were at the SQL Server Connections conference in Orlando last week, Kimberly Tripp and I did a half-hour interview for SSWUGtv with Stephen Wynkoop. We cover a bunch of stuff around HA, database maintenance and board games. The addictive game...

For part two of my short series on data file shrinking, I want to look at how elements of your schemas can cause shrink to take much longer to run. In SQL Server 2005, three things in your schema will drastically affect the run-time of data file shrink...

Frustration at Microsoft's seemingly haphazard organization of whitepapers finally won and Kimberly spent a bunch of time between sessions at SQL Server Magazine Connections putting together a great page listing a *ton* of whitepapers - see her post here...

This week's topic is data file shrinking. I've seen lots of mis-information in the last few weeks and I've had a bunch of questions about it. First up is auto-shrink. In my opinion, this feature causes way more problems than it solves (in fact, I can...

In previous posts I've explained how to use a hex editor to corrupt a database for testing and exploration. MVP Tony Rogerson has gone one step further by using bulk load to import a database into SQL Server and then create various corruptions using regular...

A great new whitepaper has just been published on TechNet - Online Indexing Operation in SQL Server 2005 . It gives a detailed explanation of the online index build process plus guidelines and best practices for implementing online indexing in production...

I was sent a question today that seems like it could be something that many people get confused about – why can’t an NTEXT column be specified in the INCLUDE list of a CREATE INDEX statement in SQL 2005? (In one of my internals posts from last year...

This is very cool - an undocumented option to UPDATE STATISTICS that allows you to fool the server into thinking a table has more rows or pages than it actually has - very useful for testing. See this blog post on the old Query Optimizer team blog. Thanks...

My recent post on SLAs prompted some interest and comments from readers so this is a follow-up to that post. What most people wanted was a list of some SLAs applicable to SQL Server - easier-said-than-done because a lot of SLAs depend on the application...