Take the following sample code. Four similar tables with an INT IDENTITY, BIGINT IDENTITY, and two with UNIQUEIDENTIFIERS, one using newid() and the other… Read More »Should I Use A Unique Identifier As A Primary Key?
Today I had the opportunity to present on TempDB to the Spokane SQL Server users group (PASS Chapter). The session was titled TempDB – Do This… Read More »TempDB – Do This and Don’t Do That
A while back a wrote a blog post with a query to Visualize the VLF’s in your database. Today I have an update to that script.
Here is an updated script that has adds another column called “TextStatus” to the output to give you a better idea of what the different statuses mean. You now get 3 statuses shown, “In Use”, “Available”, and “Available Never Used”. The If you have lots of VLFs that are “Available Never Used” that may be an indication that your log file may be larger than you need. If you don’t have any that are “Available Never Used” the log may be smaller than you need.
One of my favorite queries this week is the following query that creates a text based bar chart to quickly help visualize the VLF files on any database log file. In the last month I have given the “TempDB Do This and Don’t Do That” presentation twice, once at the Bellingham SQL Server users group, and another time at SQL Saturday Redmond. One of the questions that came up after the users group meeting was around an easy way to visualize the Virtual Log Files. Its one thing to just get a count, but to see the sizing of each VLF is helpful to understand how VLFs work.
If you are not familiar with VLFs, these are Virtual Log Files, or the chunks that make up your entire log file. When your log file grows, VLFs are added to help manage the file space. For the log growth, between 4 and 16 VLFs are added for each growth of the log file (except on SQL Server 2014 and newer, which modifies the sizing algorithm a bit).
Today I am presenting my “TempDB – Do This and Don’t Do That” session at SQL Saturday Redmond. Here is the download of the presentation… Read More »TempDB – Do This and Don’t Do That
After writing a recent blog post on Are you wasting half the capacity of IDENTITY, I started thinking about how much is too big for an… Read More »How BIG is too BIG for a BIGINT IDENTITY?
When creating a table you can specify IDENTITY with the following syntax: For example The IDENTITY property is valid for data types of the integer… Read More »Are you wasting half the capacity of IDENTITY?
Take the following sample code. Four similar tables with an INT IDENTITY, BIGINT IDENTITY, and two with UNIQUEIDENTIFIERS, one using newid() and the other… Read More »Should I Use A Unique Identifier As A Primary Key?
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… Read More »Query SQL Server 2008 Total Memory Usage