I think most DBAs by now know that heaps, tables without a clustered index, are bad and should be avoided, but the word hasn’t seemed to have trickled down to software developers yet. I still come across to many vendor databases that contain hundreds, if not thousands, of heaps. In fact, what prompted me to […]
SQL 2008 saw the introduction of data compression to SQL Server. (I’m referring specifically to data compression, not backup file compression.) This Enterprise-only feature allows SQL Server to store data on disk and in memory in a compressed format. SQL can perform three types of data compression – no compression, row compression, or page compression. […]
This is a problem all DBAs will run into at some point – the drive a database’s transaction log is on runs out of space. In most cases, this was caused by the transaction log autogrowing until there is no room left on the drive. If your alerts are set up correctly, you’ll get an […]
Updated: February 22, 2012 Some time ago, I wrote and published a routine to gather disk space usage from multiple SQL Servers. Since that was written, I’ve made some bug fixes and modifications to the routine. Tracking down those changes was becoming tedious, as they were spread out over several blog posts. I’ve decided to […]
One of the problems DBAs encounter when working with very large databases (VLDBs) is an obvious one – lack of disk space. These databases grow over time, seeming to swallow whatever disk space you can throw at them. As they get bigger, it also takes longer to perform basic maintenance tasks. If the database gets […]