Lies, damned lies, and statistics!   If you have read my three previous posts (1, 2, 3), you may walk away with an impression that on a drive presented from a high-end enterprise class disk array, Windows file fragmentation does not have a significant performance impact. And I’ve given you empirical data—oh yeah, statistics—to support that ...

In my two previous posts on the performance impact of frequent manual checkpoints and the I/O behavior of frequent manual checkpoints, I demonstrated that frequently issuing manual checkpoints can be bad for performance and why it's bad from the storage perspective. If you were led to believe that manual checkpoints were always bad, that wasn't ...

In my previous blog post on the performance impact of frequent manual checkpoints, I highlighted the performance peril of going overboard with manual checkpoints, and I suggested that a major contributing factor was the failure of frequent manual checkpoints to take advantage of the throughput potential of the underlying storage. But I didn't ...

SQL Server 2005 supports placing read-only filegroups or read-only databases on NTFS compression. In other words, you can compress the database files in a read-only filegroup or a read-only database. This can be a very useful feature if saving disk storage is of high priority. But what are the performance implications of using this SQL Server ...

In Windows Server 2003, you can use the Disk Management console to create a striped volume over multiple dynamic disks (well, you can also create a mirrored, a RAID-5 volume, etc). If these disks (or LUNs) are presented from a SAN, most likely you can stripe across the same storage devices--making up these LUNs--inside the SAN to present ...

Just google for Windows disk alignment best practice, and you would find thousands of articles, whitepapers, and posts, all preaching the practice of aligning disk partitions on the 64K boundary. For instance, one of the EMC recommendations prescribes a disk alignment value of 64K for the host file systems when deploying SQL Server 2005. Microsoft ...