If you haven't started to read Shashank Pawar (blog), you're missing out. Shashank is part of Microsoft Australia and has been writing some very good content lately. Here's an example from the Reference Architecture for High Performance SQL Server:HP and Microsoft engineering teams have worked together to create a reference architecture to ...

Is it better to move data to procedures or move procedures to data?   The answer is, of course, “it depends.” Let’s consider a scenario where you have two SQL Server instances: ServerA and ServerB, and you have a procedure on ServerB (call it procB), but need to access data on ServerA.   Three database solutions are ...

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a diverse array of issues ranging from studying SQL Server performance on various multi-core processors, pondering the implications of many-core processors, troubleshooting SQL Server performance problems, looking at the scalability of Oracle RAC and Sybase shared-disk clusters, and so ...

A significant part of my job is to evaluate how SQL Server (and sometimes other DBMSs) performs on various hardware platforms, in particular on the processors and its related chipsets as they are being released. So naturally, I’ve been paying attention to performance analysis of DBMSs.   One of the papers at the top of my reference ...

The best documentation on the I/O behavior of SQL Server checkpoints is found in SQL Server 2000 I/O Basics by Bob Dorr. In particular, you should read the following carefully: SQL Server uses the following steps to set up another page for flushing and repeats for up to 16 total pages inclusive of the first page. Do a hash lookup for the ...

SQL Server 2005 does not support hash partition as a product feature. But that doesn't mean you can't apply the concept of hash partition in your application or database design. Recently, I worked on an application that used SQL Server to persist the customized ASP.NET session state information, similar to the SQL Server mode for ASP.NET session ...

When it comes to the issue of 32-bit vs. x64, you can easily walk away from a presentation with an impression that going to x64 will most likely give your SQL Server application a performance boost. I'd like to show you--with some test data--that you should be careful with that impression. The following three environments were tested on exactly ...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get this out of the way right from the start: Don't concatenate rows into delimited strings in SQL Server. Do it client side. Except if you really have to create delimited strings in SQL Server. In which case you should read on. There was a little discussion on SQLTeam about the best way to concatenate. I ...