Archive for May, 2011

IntelliSense tip

The IntelliSense feature of SSMS in SQL 2008 is a handy feature, overall I really like it.  There was one thing that was bugging me though: If I made any schema changes while SSMS was open, Intellisense didn’t seem to know about it.  It would mark any references to those changes as invalid.  The sql [...]

May 31, 2011  Tags: ,   Posted in: Features  One Comment

Page compression and performance

I know, I know.  This is the last one on compression, I promise.  Well, the last one for… at least a month. So, we’ve talked about the different types of data compression and some things to keep in mind when deploying compression.  But we all know that the biggest factor that might keep you from [...]

May 26, 2011  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Features  No Comments

A little more about compression

Happy Monday folks!  Ready to talk some more about compression? Unicode Compression Another type of compression new in SQL Server 2008 is Unicode compression.  This is basically row compression for nchar and nvarchar datatypes.  Per BOL, SQL Server uses the Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode (SCSU) algorithm to achieve up to 50% space savings on [...]

May 23, 2011  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Features  No Comments

Page compression (!)

Ok kids, last time I introduced row compression, today I want to take the next step and talk about page compression.  Now, whereas row compression removed NULL and 0 values from each individual record, page compression removes redundant values from a table.  Redundant data is stored on the page only once, and subsequent occurrences will [...]

May 19, 2011  Tags: ,   Posted in: Features  No Comments

Row compression

It’s said that there are 2 things you can count on in life: death and taxes. For DBAs, I’d like to add a third: database growth. Let’s face it, our need to store more and more data is only increasing and so is our need to retain this data for longer periods of time. And [...]

May 17, 2011  Tags: ,   Posted in: Features  No Comments