It was an offer I could not resist. I was promised a free copy of one of the newest books from Red Gate Books, SQL Server Transaction Log Management (by Tony Davis and Gail Shaw), with the caveat that I should write a review after reading it. Mind you, not a commercial, “make sure we sell more copies” kind of review, but a review of my actual ...

I’d really like to get another post up onto my much neglected blog before the end of 2012. This will also start one of my New Year’s resolutions, which is to write at least one blog post a month. I’m going to tell you about a change in SQL Server that wasn’t announced in any “What’s New” list that I ever saw, perhaps because it was just a chance ...

I was out of the country for the last two weeks of March, delivering classes in Brisbane and Sydney, which were organized by WardyIT.  It was a great visit and there were 24 terrific students! As is sometimes (perhaps often?)  the case, there were questions posed that I couldn’t answer during class, so here are a couple of follow-up ...

2 years ago I wrote about monitoring page splits with Extended Events. Only 2 bloggers explored Extended Events feature at that time, so my post was more of a learning than for any practical matter. Yet one question remained open: according to straightforward calculations, after 3 splits of the first page, next split should have occurred on ...

Last week, I wrote about logging for index rebuild operations.  I wanted to publish the result of that testing as soon as I could, because that dealt with a specific question I was trying to answer. However, I actually started out my testing by looking at the logging that was done for a different operation, and ended up generating some new ...

This blog post was inspired by a question from a future student. Someone who was already booked for my SQL Server Internals class in June asked for some information on a current problem he was having with transaction log writes causing excessive wait times during index rebuild operations when run in ONLINE mode. He wanted to know if switching to ...

SQL Server 2005 added the STOPAT option for the RESTORE DATABASE command. This sounds great - we can stop at some point in time during the database backup process was running! Or? No, we can't. Here follows some tech stuff why not, and then what the option is really meant for: A database backup includes all used extents and also all log ...

''Never'' is a strong word, so let me say that we really really want to avoid it, if at all humanly possible. In short, we will have a (potentially) broken database, both at the physical level and at the logical level. Read on. Just to be clear, when I refer to a ''log file'' here, I'm talking about a transaction log file, an .ldf file. Ever so ...

This is really basic, but so often overlooked and misunderstood. Basically, we have a database, and something goes south. Can we restore all the way up to that point? I.e., even if the last backup (db or log) is earlier than the disaster? Yes, of course we can (unless for more extreme cases, read on), but many don't realize/do that, for some ...

Seems like a simple enough question, right? This question (but more targeted, read on) was raised in an MCT forum. While the discussion was on-going and and I tried to come up with answers, I realized that this question are really several questions. First, what is a rollback? I can see three different types of rollbacks (there might be more, of ...