March 2007 - Posts

• How does your schema affect your shrink run-time?

  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. Read More... Posted Thursday, March 29, 2007 10:58 AM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 1 Comments Filed under: Shrink

• Where are all the whitepapers?

  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 Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007 5:18 AM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 1 Comments

• Turn AUTO_SHRINK off!!

  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't Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007 5:13 AM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 6 Comments Filed under: Shrink

• Easy way to create a corrupt database for testing

  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 Read More... Posted Thursday, March 22, 2007 12:29 PM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 2 Comments

• New whitepaper on Online Indexing Operations

  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. Read More... Posted Thursday, March 15, 2007 6:56 AM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 1 Comments Filed under: General

• Can you INCLUDE columns of type TEXT, NTEXT, or IMAGE?

  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 there’s Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007 2:31 PM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 0 Comments Filed under: General

• How to create fake statistics for testing query plans

  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 Read More... Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 6:44 PM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 1 Comments Filed under: General

• More on Service Level Agreements...

  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 Read More... Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 5:35 PM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 1 Comments Filed under: Disaster Recovery, Service Level Agreements

• Podcast interview with the UK Next Generation User Group

  While in the UK last week, Kimberly and I were interviewed by David McMahon of the Next Generation User Group . Topics covered include the crappy weather, why we took 5 years to ship, 3 features I wish we'd done in Yukon, and our favorite features in Read More... Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 12:20 AM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 1 Comments

• Sometimes life throws you a curve-ball...

  Many apologies to those who were hoping to see my presentation on corruption detection and recovery at SQL Server Open World in Denmark last week. An emergency came up after the class Kimberly and I taught in England and we ended up flying a *lot* further Read More... Posted Sunday, March 11, 2007 12:08 AM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 1 Comments Filed under: General

• Oh no – my backup is corrupt too! Help!

  Funny how a bunch of people all seem to have the same problem at the same time. Maybe it’s just that people don’t want to talk about corruption until someone else does – it’s like a dark secret that once let out of the bag – everyone talks. The common Read More... Posted Monday, March 05, 2007 1:59 PM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 2 Comments Filed under: DBCC, Disaster Recovery, Backup, Restore

• What are SLAs and why are they important?

  (In the UK now hanging out with Kimberly and Tony Rogerson before teaching a Masterclass tomorrow in Reading. Then it's off to Copenhagen for SQL Server Open World , with a little R&R in London beforehand and Copenhagen afterwards, before we fly back Read More... Posted Sunday, March 04, 2007 11:52 AM by Paul Randal - MSFT | 5 Comments Filed under: Disaster Recovery, Service Level Agreements

• Using Visual Studio’s Code Model objects for code base understanding

  A bit of a diversion from the normal SQL Server posts. Recently I’ve found a very useful feature in Visual Studio that can help to analyze large amounts of source code – the Visual Studio Code Model objects Depending on the language of the code base a Read More... Posted Friday, March 02, 2007 8:26 AM by JHalmans | 0 Comments