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 ...

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 ...

As I mentioned last October, my PASS preconference seminar was a whole day about the transaction log. I told the attendees all kinds of things about the structure of the log, and told them about one of the best tools for exploring the structure: the command DBCC LOGINFO. This command is officially undocumented, but numerous bloggers have discussed ...