The following applies to SQL Server 2008. How big of an allocation does max represent in the case of varchar(max) and varbinary(max)? Up to 2 ^ 31 – 1 bytes or just about 2gb.   Can I specify a varchar(9000) or varbinary(12000)? No. If you are going to specify an actual number instead of (max) then your limit is 8000. …

varchar(max) and varbinary(max) Questions and Answers Read more »

The quick and easy way to determine how much memory your SQL Server is using is to look at the Task Manager on the server and find “sqlservr.exe” in the process list, and look at the “Mem Usage” column. But what if you are not on the server, or if you want to grab this information programmatically from an application, …

Query SQL Server 2008 Total Memory Usage Read more »

I recently have had the opportunity to work on performance tuning on Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Recently I have been doing more with performance tuning on Oracle. The following is something that I have discovered to be very similar between Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, but the names are different between the two systems. So this brings me back to …

How much Procedure Cache memory does one SQL Statement take up? Read more »

A week or so ago I heard someone on the radio talking about Open DNS as a way to help protect children from some of the nasty sites on the internet. After using it now for about a week, I am very impressed, and I have realize that there are some very interesting features beyond just blocking bad sites. DNS …

OpenDNS Review – What a Great Site, what a great service Read more »

MySQL is to Oracle as Linux is to Windows. Limiting Result Sets Oracle supports ROWNUM to limit the result Sets SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE rowmun < 10 MySql uses the LIMIT clause. SELECT * FROM tablename LIMIT 10 Bind Variables The latest versions of MySql supports bind variables, and Oracle has supported bind variables for a very long time. …

A Comparison of Oracle and MySQL Read more »