I recently received a question about the storage of nonclustered index keys. I am assuming you are aware of the fact that if your table has a clustered index, SQL Server uses the clustered index key (all of its columns, if it is a composite index) as a 'bookmark' in your nonclustered indexes,  to allow your nonclustered indexes to uniquely ...

  I had a fantastic time at the SQL Server 2008 JumpStart last week in Redmond. Getting to spend a whole week learning new stuff from Kim and Paul was awesome! My favorite topic was one from Paul called ''DBCC CHECKDB Fundamentals in only 487 slides.'' Although I am still absorbing much of that information, it did remind me of a DBCC CHECKDB ...

SQL Server 2005 allows rows to include variable length columns which do not actually fit in the maximum row size of 8060 bytes. I previously posted about row-overflow columns, and discussed the maximum number of such columns that you could have in a single table. You can read that post here. Just recently I received another question that ...

Caching and reusing query plans is both a good thing and a bad thing. Saving costs of recompilation for a query that is run repeatedly can be a good thing. Using a cached plan that is not appropriate can be a very bad thing. What do you do if you have plans in cache that should not be there? SQL Server 2000 and 2005 provide a way to clear ...

I recently was bitten by some not so obvious behavior with DBCC OPENTRAN() that I would like to share.  Basically this command is supposed to show you the oldest open transaction within the specified database or the current one if none is specified. If you run the example below you can see the expected behavior. USE Tempdb ;GOCREATE TABLE ...