Editorials

Webcast Today: Database Recovery 101

Featured Article(s)
Useful Undocumented Informational SQL Server 2008 DBCC Commands
In this article, Alexander Chigrik shows some useful undocumented informational DBCC commands that shipped with SQL Server 2008.

Webcast Today: Database Recovery 101
Every DBA is required to maintain good backups of their systems. But what are your options for recovering the system once you do experience a failure? In this presentation youll learn how to restore various types of database backups, the impact the recovery process has on your system, and how to estimate downtime and time to recover. Presented by: Buck Woody

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> Live date: 11/4/2009 at 12:00 Pacific (Today)

Interesting Performance Dilemma and Observation
In a recent class, one of the questions asked had to do with performance, management studio what types of things Microsoft has done to speed up the UI.

There’s no doubt that some of the items you can access can be lengthy at best. Things like job histories, log files and such can take quite some time to load. The question, then, was whether the underlying tables were indexed to help out with performance? Of course the follow-on question was "if not, why, and if not, would it help?"

Interestingly, the tables are, by and large, NOT indexed. There may be exceptions, but in talking with some folks at Microsoft and after poking around manually, it’s clear that this is the case in general. The reasoning is because the tables are generally a) small enough as to not benefit from indexing, and b) accessed infrequently, so the overhead could be more than it’s worth.

That said, it would be an interesting experiment to index some of these, see if it helps with reviewing things like history and logs, particularly in cases where some of these review options actually timeout and can be a real drag to review. Have you done this (add the indexes)? If so, did it help with your access times?

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Featured White Paper(s)

Top Ten Things You Should Know About Optimizing SQL Server
Optimizing SQL Server performance is difficult. There is a lot of information out there, but very little of it is specific o… (read more)