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 ...

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 ...

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 ...