Okay, it’s a bit of a hyperbole. But let me elaborate. I regularly bump into SQL Server discussions, online or elsewhere, in which I hear people speaking with confidence that an operation is so and so because it is doing sequential disk I/Os or because it is doing random disk I/Os. That always makes me wonder how they know and how they can be so ...

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 ...

I always like simple frameworks that help put some order into chaos.   Last month while in Seattle, I ran into something that for whatever reason had managed to escape my radar screen. If there was a single thing that made the trip to Seattle worthwhile, that was it.   I’m talking about the CAP Theorem. I'm blogging about it here ...

  In one of their year 2000 papers—Rules of Thumb in Data Engineering, Jim Gray and Prashant Shenoy stated that, “Over the last decade, disk pages have grown from 2KB to 8KB and poised to grow again. In ten years, the typical small transfer unit will probably be 64KB, and large transfer units will be a megabyte or more.”   Should we ...

Alan Cranfield on the SSWUG list alerted me to a paper by Mike Stonebraker and folks, proclaiming the end of the current relational database architecture that is generally embraced by all the major commercial relational DBMS and annoucing that a far better paradigm would be based on specialized engines. You can find the paper ...

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 ...

There seems to be a consensus that we are at an important inflection point in computing because of the emerging trend towards multicores on a chip near term and manycores on a chip in a not so distant future. If you are writing software, you need to have a solid understanding of what this means, or you’d be left behind.   If you are a user ...

Right now, flash memory-based solid state drives are still more expensive than traditional disk drives in terms of the cost per gigabyte. But flash-based drives or some type of hybrid that combines both flash and traditional disk drives seem to be coming. There have been a lot of talks about the potential impact of flash memory in general. But I ...

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 ...