Time complexity of processing in Analysis Services
When I build enterprise scale solution it is crucial for me to know what sort of scalability can be expected from a server product. Is it linear? It is exponential? Should I scale-out or scale-up? Are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Latch and Spinlock Papers Published on Microsoft
I am happy to announce that my team mates, Ewan Fairweather and Mike Ruthruff have published two excellent whitepapers on latch and spinlock diagnosis. You can find them here: SQL Server latch...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Setting Yourself up for Windows Debugging
Lately, I have been doing a fair amount of debugging, and helped other people set up their debuggers. It can be very painful to make this work. To assist up and coming debuggers, I put my notes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Effect of CPU Caches and Memory Access Patterns
In this blog, I will provide you with some “Grade of the Steel” background information that will help you understand CPU caches and their effects better. As we move towards a future where power...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Configuring Kernel Debugging with WinDbg and a NULL modem
Lately, I have been digging deep into Windows to get really low level with the the I/O path SQL Server takes (yep, there is an even deeper layer to understand fully). Once you start playing around with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VM-ware Shared folders are really Slow
I am currently waiting for some code to compile and found a bit of time to type up a quick blog. As described in a previous post, I am have set up my laptop to host Windows in a virtual machine guest...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Synchronisation in .NET– Part 2:Unsafe Data Structures and Padding
In the previous blog post we saw how the lock() statement in .NET scales very poorly when there is a contention on a data structure. It was clear that a performance logging framework that relies on an...
View ArticleSQL Server Configuration
Throughout the years, I have become convinced that the default settings used in SQL Server are often wrong for systems that need scale or are properly managed. There is a series of settings I find...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Curious Partition Function Behaviour
Just another short blog today describing a curious issue I found with a query plan this week and a “workaround”. In our core system, we have a table with two partitions. One partition contains all the...
View ArticleOn using Query Hints
The revealed wisdom in the SQL Server community has generally been that query hints should only be used as a last resort. For a complete novice of SQL Server, I would agree. But to call avoiding query...
View Article
