SQL Server A to Z – Heaps

Happy Monday, SQL peeps. I hope everyone had a great weekend. I, for one, had so much fun on Saturday, that I spent Sunday recovering. When did I get old?В  Anyway, time for another installment of SQL Server A to Z. Today we’re talking about heaps. What is a heap? A heap is a table [...]

August 8, 2011  Tags: , ,   Posted in: General  No Comments

SQL Server A to Z – DMV

Today’s episode of SQL Server A to Z is brought to you by the letter D.В  D is for Dynamic Management View (DMV).В  DMVs were introduced in SQL 2005 as a way to provide administrators with a window into what’s going on in SQL Server at any given moment.В  This can range from OS statistics, [...]

July 18, 2011  Tags: ,   Posted in: Features  No Comments

How is SQL Server using all that memory, anyway?

I want to stick with the subject of memory because I think it’s probably the most misunderstood (and sometimes downright mysterious) component of SQL Server. I know I, for one, could benefit from a better understanding of its inner workings. So today I’d like to share that little bit of code I mentioned last week, [...]

May 2, 2011  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: General, SQL Tuning, Troubleshooting  No Comments

Available Workspace Memory

My research into the Resource Governor question and its answer brought up another question for me: Where does that total_memory_kb number for the default pool actually come from? After all, I have a max server memory of 26000MB for the instance, so why 18175MB?В  The BOL description for this field wasn’t very helpful.В  Googling for [...]

April 28, 2011  Tags: ,   Posted in: General, SQL Tuning, Troubleshooting  No Comments