I have been testing out some interesting items that were mentioned in sessions at the PASS Summit in Seattle last month. One of these was the concept of Instant File Initialization (IFI) for large database files. Even though this feature has been around since Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005, I decided to include […]

The Data Collector was introduced in SQL Server 2008 and provides some great functionality “out of the box,” with some cool interactive reports based on performance metrics. I spent much of the PASS Summit conference last month trying to track down the source code for these reports. Eventually, I tracked down Bill Ramos, Principal Program […]

I remember from my Sybase days that SQL Server tables could support up to 255 indexes. One clustered index and 254 non-clustered indexes. In Microsoft SQL Server that changed to just 249 non-clustered indexes. Where did those extra 5 potential indexes go? As a rough rule of thumb, we would always try for ten or less indexes per table for an OLTP environment so what’s the big deal? Well, now SQL Server 2008 supports up to 999 non-clustered indexes per table. Why?

SQL Server 2008 supports Policy Based Management. When it was first announced it was called the Declarative Management Framework but PBM has stuck. It’s SQL Server’s version of Group Policy but luckily Active Directory is not involved at all. In fact, that was a requirement. I think Microsoft learned their lesson with Exchange 2000. It’s […]

SQL Server 2008 introduced a great new feature called TDE, Transparent Data Encryption. It allowed a database to be completely encrypted without having to change the applications that access it. It is referred to as encryption for “data at rest”. But what about data in motion? That’s where column-level encryption pays off to provide end-to-end […]