I have just finished all of the paperwork. For spring quarter 2009, I will be teaching a SQL Server DBA class at Western Washington University. The class is for the SQL Server 2005 Specialist Certificate program at WWU. It is part of the Extended Education program.
SQL Server 2008 introduces a new feature called Filtered Index. A filtered index is a way of adding a WHERE clause to the index definition to get faster access to a subset of the data. For instance if you have a huge table where you are typically only accessing a small part of the table, you can add a filtered …
The biggest benefit that I see with the new backup compression in SQL Server 2008 is that it improves the speed of the restore. The thing that is far more important that a database backup is the actual restore process, and with a compressed backup, this can speed up the restore time by as much as 40% which can make …
In SQL Server, an empty or a null column still would take up space in the database, so even if you added a column that was set to null values, there would still be space taken up in the database. Sparse Columns introduced in SQL Server 2008, are a new type of column configuration that truly take up zero space …
Tonight I had the opportunity to present to the Bellingham .NET users group. About 30 people showed up for the presentation. SQL Server Performance Tuning and Advanced Query Tuning: This presentation will include SQL Server performance tuning tips and recommendations for both the developer and the database administrator. Topics covered will include index usage details, query tuning, understanding the …
SQL Server Performance Tuning for the Bellingham .NET users group Read more »
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 »
Cleaning up extra indexes, and implementing parameterized queries. I don’t know how many times I have had to explain the difference between a clustered index and a non-clustered index. In the end it is all good. Better performance, faster software, and happier customers.
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, …
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 »
This week I started working at Emergency Reporting doing database performance tuning and scalability work. Currently this is a half time gig focused on SQL Server database performance. Fun stuff.