Outlook and RSS Feed Viewer
We spend hours and hours staring at our email One of the most popular email client is MS Outlook. One thing I like to do is to add my favorite feeds to my client. It makes posts readily available and easy to share. Plus, it is a good distration to enhance your skills or just a good distraction.
As a production DBA , I get to start diving into the internals of the SQL Server environment. Over the last year, we had an opportunity to ‘let loose’ on a new clustered environment with a dedicated SAN. Zoom… Zoom…Zoom! It was like performing sea trials or a shakedown tour in a new ship. Much of the testing centered around the execution of existing SQL code and processes. We were able to set-up a series of tests using the Microsoft ‘s SQLIO Disk Subsystem Benchmark Tool to saturate the disk subsystems.
The tool does not actually test your SQL Server configuration , but provides the means to script out and execute a controlled load against the disk subsystem. Scripts can be executed to create a variety of read and write operations. Parameters allow the load to use a variety of file sizes, number of threads, latency, outstanding requests in random or sequential reads/writes for specific durations. I am not going to get into the specifics of the scripts we used. The links below provide a much better examples than I could tap out in this post.
One important tool in managing disk space is to make sure the system accurately reports space used by tables. DBCC UPDATEUSAGE will update the values returned by sp_spaceused.
The output of sp_spaceused “displays the number of rows, disk space reserved, and disk space used by a table, indexed view, or Service Broker queue in the current database, or displays the disk space reserved and used by the whole database.” One thing to note when reviewing the output is you may see the the reserved size is disportionately larger than the data and index space used. The reserved space should always be greater, but in one case I did see > 20 GB of difference. The space reported by system can get out of whack (technical term) from repeated use of TRUNCATE statements and frequent DDL statements.
Excellent article on DBCC UPDATEUSAGE by Armando Prato.
Google search for DBCC UPDATEUSAGE.