WesleyB's Blog : SQL Server 2008

SQL Server Day 2009

wesback — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:27:00 GMT

The Belgian SQL Server User Group is organizing the second SQL Server Day on the 3rd of December. Last year about 200 people gathered for this event and of course we hope to have even more this year!
Please visit http://www.sqlserverday.be for more information and registration (coming soon).

There will be in-depth sessions on SQL Server 2008 as well as a glimpse of the future with SQL Server 2008 R2, Project Gemini and more! Currently there are 2 tracks, one for the DBA and one for the Business Intelligence people. Obviously there will be some great speakers like Dirk Gubbels, Henk van der Valk, Chris Webb, ...

Hope to see you there!

Cumulative update package 3 for SQL Server 2008 SP1

wesback — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:48:00 GMT

The third cumulative update package for SQL Server 2008 SP1 is now available @ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971491.
This will take you to build 10.00.2723.

People using the auditing function will probably be interested in the following fix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967552.

Data Compression and Heaps

wesback — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:14:00 GMT

I think we can all agree that Data Compression is a great new functionality in SQL Server 2008. I know many of you have been experimenting with it but there was one little catch I wanted you to be aware of.

When you apply page compression to a table the pages get compressed when they are full but there is an exception as you would have expected. When you have a heap the newly allocated pages are NOT compressed until you rebuild the table (or remove and reapply compression or add and remove a clustered index) unless you are using BULK INSERT.

I have added a test script so you can see it with your own eyes.

First the clustered table:

SET NOCOUNT ON
GO

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[myClusteredTable]') AND type in (N'U'))
DROP TABLE [dbo].[myClusteredTable]
GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO

SET ANSI_PADDING ON
GO

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[myClusteredTable](
[ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[TheDate] [date] NOT NULL,
[TheTime] [time](7) NOT NULL,
[SomeFiller] [varchar](256) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_myClusteredTable] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
[ID] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY]
) ON [PRIMARY]

SET ANSI_PADDING OFF
GO

--Add some records to the table with varying length
INSERT INTO dbo.myClusteredTable
VALUES (SYSDATETIME(), SYSDATETIME(), REPLICATE('W', CEILING(RAND() * 100) + 1))

GO 15000

--Check the space used
sp_spaceused myClusteredTable

--Now apply compression
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[myClusteredTable] REBUILD PARTITION = ALL
WITH
(DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE
)
GO

--Check the space used
sp_spaceused myClusteredTable
GO

--Add some more records to the table
INSERT INTO dbo.myClusteredTable (TheDate, TheTime, SomeFiller)
SELECT TheDate, TheTime, SomeFiller FROM myClusteredTable
GO

--Check the space used again
sp_spaceused myClusteredTable
GO

DROP TABLE myClusteredTable

As you can see the compression keeps going even when you insert new rows.
But what about the heap?

SET NOCOUNT ON
GO

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[myHeap]') AND type in (N'U'))
DROP TABLE [dbo].[myHeap]
GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO

SET ANSI_PADDING ON
GO

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[myHeap](
[ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[TheDate] [date] NOT NULL,
[TheTime] [time](7) NOT NULL,
[SomeFiller] [varchar](256) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_myHeap] PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED
(
[ID] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY]
) ON [PRIMARY]

SET ANSI_PADDING OFF
GO

--Add some records to the table with varying length
INSERT INTO dbo.myHeap
VALUES (SYSDATETIME(), SYSDATETIME(), REPLICATE('W', CEILING(RAND() * 100) + 1))

GO 15000

--Check the space used
sp_spaceused myHeap

--Now apply compression
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[myHeap] REBUILD PARTITION = ALL
WITH
(DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE
)
GO

--Check the space used
sp_spaceused myHeap
GO

--Add some more records to the table
INSERT INTO dbo.myHeap (TheDate, TheTime, SomeFiller)
SELECT TheDate, TheTime, SomeFiller FROM myHeap
GO

--Check the space used again
sp_spaceused myHeap
GO

--Rebuild the heap?
ALTER TABLE myHeap REBUILD
GO

--Check the space used again
sp_spaceused myHeap
GO

--What about a bulk insert?
BULK INSERT TestDB.dbo.MyHeap
   FROM 'c:\temp\test.txt'
   WITH
      (
   FORMATFILE='c:\temp\myHeap.xml',
   KEEPIDENTITY,
   TABLOCK
      )
GO

--Check the space used again
sp_spaceused myHeap
GO

--Rebuild the heap?
ALTER TABLE myHeap REBUILD
GO

--Check the space used again
sp_spaceused myHeap
GO

--Seems compression was indeed applied with BULK INSERT, go ahead and drop the test table
DROP TABLE myHeap

This was tested on SQL Server 2008 SP1 + CU2 (build 10.0.2714).

Cumulative update package 2 for SQL Server 2008 SP1

wesback — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:24:00 GMT

The second cumulative update package for SQL Server 2008 SP1 is now available @ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970315.
This will take you to build 10.00.2714.

And do not forget the "Lock Pages In Memory" change (here)!

Lock Pages In Memory in SQL Server Standard Edition

wesback — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:30:00 GMT

Until now "Lock Pages In Memory" was an option only available to SQL Server Enterprise Edition customers. Very simply put it prevents SQL Server from paging out the memory it has allocated (a deep explanation can be found in the references below). We got a lot of feedback from customers who wanted to have support for this in SQL Server Standard Edition too. So we are very pleased to announce that it will be available in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition too (as of SQL Server 2005 SP3 CU4 and SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU2). As with everything do not just enable this option by default but carefully plan and test.

More information on this can be found on http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2009/04/24/sql-server-locked-pages-and-standard-sku.aspx

Slava Oks did a great job in explaining the Lock Pages In Memory (and AWE) mechanism on http://blogs.msdn.com/slavao/archive/2005/04/29/413425.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/slavao/archive/2005/08/31/458545.aspx.

Cumulative update package 1 for SQL Server 2008 SP1

wesback — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:08:00 GMT

Wow, the guys in the SQL Server team are working really hard.
The first CU for SQL Server 2008 SP1 has already been released and will take you to build 10.00.2710.

More information here.

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1

wesback — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:10:00 GMT

We are very proud to announce the release of the first service pack for SQL Server 2008.

With the release of SQL Server 2008 we have also made great investments in the installer. I am sure you have all noticed that the setup experience is completely different from the previous version of SQL Server. By doing this we have made way for a long requested feature for SQL Server, slipstreaming of service packs. Our good friend Peter Saddow has listed the steps to follow to create your own slipstreamed install package here.

Other nice improvements are the ability to uninstall the service pack and the support for click-once deployment of Report Builder 2.0. Also notice that SQL Server 2008 SP1 has 80% fewer fixes than SQL Server 2005 SP1!

So big thumbs up for the SQL Server team!

The official announcement can be found on the Data Platform Insider blog.
You can download SQL Server 2008 SP1 here.

*EDIT*
This post is an absolute must-read regarding SQL Server 2008 SP1 (thanks Bob!)

Cumulative update package 4 for SQL Server 2008

wesback — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:09:00 GMT

The guys that deliver the CUs sure do a great job, yet another one delivered on time.
This one will take you to build 10.00.1798.

More information here.

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 - CTP

wesback — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:16:00 GMT

We are very pleased to announce the first CTP of Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008.

Apart from all the fixes we also made a couple investments that you will appreciate. The change that will make many of you very happy is that we now allow slipstreaming of service packs and hotfixes!!!

The Data Loading Performance Guide

wesback — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:52:00 GMT

SQL Server has been gaining a lot of credibility in the data warehousing market the last couple of years. With that the challenge arises more and more to load massive amounts of data in SQL Server. Obviously this is a matter of good hardware in combination with the 'right' way of doing things. Lucky for us there is the SQLCAT team to do the hard work for us - learning the lessons the hard way that is - and they have published a very good whitepaper around data loading in SQL Server. This whitepaper is really a must read if you are thinking of loading data in SQL Server and just a very interesting read that helps you understand the concepts of massive loads, I/O and SQL Server behavior in general.

Check it out here.

SAP on SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008

wesback — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:59:00 GMT

We are very proud to announce that SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 are now officially a supported solution for SAP.
More information can be found in this press release.

Some quick facts from our SAP portal site:

Over 65,000 SAP installations are on the Windows Server platform
Over 25,000 SAP installations are on SQL Server
Over 200 SAP customers have a productive database size of over 1TB and run on SQL Server
A joint Microsoft and SAP customer has a production database size of over 13TB and runs on SQL Server
A joint Microsoft and SAP customer is running SAP ERP with over 3,000 concurrent users on SQL Server
Another component of reducing cost - server consolidation - is addressed by Microsoft’s Virtualization solution that was recently certified by SAP

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Books Online - January 2009 Update

wesback — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:39:00 GMT

Another update to the Books Online for SQL Server 2008 has been posted.
Get it here.

Is it just me or is SQL Server a very well documented product? What is your experience with other products?

Cumulative update package 3 for SQL Server 2008

wesback — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:17:00 GMT

Again another 2 months have passed since the last CU for SQL Server 2008 was released.
We all know that means the new CU has arrived, this time it will take you to build 10.00.1787.

More information here.

PS. Sorry for the delay in posting but I am on a holiday :-)

SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide

wesback — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:01:00 GMT

Just a quick notification that the SQL Server 2008 version of this wonderful guide is out.
If you are looking at upgrading to SQL Server 2008 this is a must read!

Get it here.

Cumulative update package 2 for SQL Server 2008

wesback — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:56:00 GMT

It has been almost 2 months so here is CU2 for SQL Server 2008 RTM.
This time it will take you to build 1779.

Check out the details here.