October 2011 - Posts

• Creating features for 1% of the users

  While at PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, I had a conversation with an attendee from one of the largest US companies. As expected and like any of the largest US companies, this company has multiple DBMS platforms. The conversation then turned to how SQL Server Read More... Posted Monday, October 17, 2011 6:50 PM by Linchi Shea | 9 Comments Filed under: Cluster, Rant

• Is the SELECT permission checked in an UPDATE statement?

  I was at PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle and had a chat with Jack Richins of Microsoft on the SQL Server audit feature after his presentation. A question came up with regards to whether the SELECT permission should be checked when an UPDATE statement is being Read More... Posted Monday, October 17, 2011 4:44 PM by Linchi Shea | 0 Comments Filed under: Audit, Server audit, SQL Server 2008

• Fully transparent table partitioning for OLTP

  No, this is not something announced at PASS Summit 2011. But it’s something that has been on my wish list for a long time. Table partitioning is a great feature, and overwhelmingly, table partitioning is touted as a data warehousing feature for both sliding Read More... Posted Monday, October 17, 2011 3:27 PM by Linchi Shea | 10 Comments Filed under: Table partitioning

• A quick look at SQL Server Audit in Denali CTP3

  I have been using the SQL Server 2008 audit feature on a regular basis and generally like it a lot. No doubt there is still room for improvement to make it practically more useful. Here are three changes I would love to see. · You can’t really just audit Read More... Posted Friday, October 07, 2011 3:27 PM by Linchi Shea | 2 Comments Filed under: Denali, Server audit

• Transactional replication and massive data updates

  SQL Server transactional replication has been a rather solid feature and works well for delivering data to reporting servers (among other things) in near real time. That said, it may not work too well when you need to perform massive updates on a published Read More... Posted Thursday, October 06, 2011 1:19 AM by Linchi Shea | 4 Comments Filed under: Performance, Replication, Scripting

• Multi-victim deadlocks – a simple example

  Recently, I ran into a series of deadlocks that had multiple victims in each deadlock. In other words, SQL Server chose more than one spid to terminate in resolving a deadlock. Maybe I need to brush up my web search skills, but I have not found much information Read More... Posted Sunday, October 02, 2011 2:33 AM by Linchi Shea | 3 Comments Filed under: Deadlock, multi-victim deadlocks

• Performance impact: Don’t assume they are the same

  When you deploy a production cluster, you want any failover to be as transparent to your users as possible. It follows that the nodes within the cluster should be identical in terms of their hardware and software configurations. It further follows that Read More... Posted Saturday, October 01, 2011 12:42 PM by Linchi Shea | 3 Comments Filed under: Benchmark, Performance