Too many DBAs tend to view a drive presented from a Storage Area Network (SAN) as something of a monolithic nature. They look at the drive as if it had some intrinsic performance characteristics. This view doesn't help one appreciate the true performance characteristics of such a drive. A more constructive view is to look at the drive as an I/O ...

How can you corrupt an online SQL Server 2005 database? Okay, why would you want to do that? Well, let's say because you want to test out some DBCC commands. If you take a SQL Server 2005 database offline, you can easily corrupt it by opening it with a different program and messing up the file content. But then it's unlikely you can ...

Recently, when I was doing some I/O performance tests on an I/O path, I found that 8K random reads (and writes) significantly and consistently outperformed 8K sequential reads (and writes) in terms of I/O throughput (megabytes per second). I was puzzled. With a traditional hard disk that is made up of a stack of magnetic platters held by a ...

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 ...

Let’s say you are trying to determine the performance impact of a neat database design change you have just devised on an application. So you run some tests with the existing design and the tests run for several hours. Coming back the next day, you make the change and re-run the same tests. The test results look fantastic. Now, before you ...