SQL Fascination

As Captain Oates once said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’ – feels like quite a while since I had to time to see down and write something.

I had a bit of time to take a look at the SQL Internals Viewer (http://internalsviewer.codeplex.com/) , it has been out for some time but I had never downloaded it to play around to see how useful it is in terms of a way of learning more about the internals.

The Page Viewer is excellent, the breakdown of a page into the component parts for a row and the display of the page data is a superb aid to anyone wanting to understand how the data is stored on a page. Whilst you can use DBCC PAGE to get at all this information, presenting it in such a readable form will satisfy most people easily.

The page allocation map is a nice little addition, but really is just an extension of showing you what pages belong to which object etc.

The transaction log viewer though I was really looking forward to seeing, primarily to help me decode more transactions, but it has been a bit disappointing – the level of detail shown is very limited, and provides no real benefit over just looking at the log directly, or using the last transaction log trick I have previously posted.

As you can see from the screenshot, the level of details is pretty light for a simple transaction, no actual breakdown of the log record itself is provided, which is a shame – whilst it does given you some basic information and will help some people, I think if you are at the stage where you are taking an interest in the transaction log, you are already beyond this point.

So as an educational / learning aid, it is pretty good on the page internals side – and anyone wanting an easier way to visualize that for learning it is still worth grabbing. I would love to see more on the Log side – but at present the project appears to be in hibernation, with no changes in some considerable time, so I suspect we will not see any enhancements now.