I'm in a situation where I have configured the new data collector functionality for three instances. And there's no way to undo the config performed by the wizard! It cannot be undone by the wizard, and BOL doesn't have information on how to do this. In fact, I suspect that you in the end need to use some of the undocumented data collector ...

My previous post shows that data compression may not come for free, although hopefully by the RTM time the adverse performance impact on inserts will have been reduced significantly. In this post, I want to show you that data compression can enhance read performance. Intuitively, data compression may reduce the number of pages SQL Server ...

Before I begin, let me be very clear that the results I report in this post were obtained with SQL Server 2008 CTP6. Microsoft is still working on improving the performance of data compression. And in particular, the performance of inserting into a compressed table is expected to be significantly enhanced in SQL Server 2008 RTM. In my previous ...

SQL Server 2008 has introduced a long sought after feature -- Data Compression. This is a great feature, and I have no doubt it'll be widely used. The key compression method is called page compression, which uses the following three techniques to reduce the space taken up by duplicates on a page: Row compression. This technique changes the ...

I guess that many people using UPDATE … FROM on a daily basis do so without being aware that they are violating all SQL standards.   All versions of the ANSI SQL standard that I checked agree that an UPDATE statement has three clauses – the UPDATE clause, naming the table to be updated; the SET clause, specifying the columns to change and ...

Microsoft released a document today with some SQL Server 2008 benchmarks I found this sentence very interesting The result demonstrates the scale-up capabilities of SQL Server 2008 on HP Integrity. The 10TB benchmark is so demanding that only six other results have been published in the nine-year history of TPC-H. More information on the ...

Long gone are the days when you can reasonably expect to know all aspects of SQL Server at a deep level.  When a new version starts to emerge, I try to put some scope around the features that I will dive more deeply into.  I'm publishing my list here so that like-minded SQL Server enthusiasts may become aware of a feature or ...