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SQL Internals Viewer
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.
SQL Immersion Event – Dublin 2010
I attended the SQL Immersion event last year in Dublin and can honestly say that it was the best training course I have ever attended. The level of detail is phenomenal and the interaction with Paul and Kim is superb. I can not recommend the course heavily enough and anyone who is serious about SQL should make the effort to attend one of these, I would even go as far as to say fund it yourself if you have to. Prodata have not only managed to get Paul and Kim back to run it again, but have also got 2 additional master class courses being scheduled as well. I have a feeling these must be closer to including more information / material from the SQL MCM course, which would be superb, but I will have to check whether the bank balance can handle doing them.
The Immersion event is split again into two tracks, DBA and Developer although both sides of that fence benefit from having a good in-depth understanding of the other, so I would ignore the distinction and go for the full ‘Immersion’, there is no reason that a DBA shouldn’t understand indexes and index tuning in depth, or that a developer shouldn’t have a good understanding of the transaction log and internal structure within SQL. I did the full course before and spent most evenings doing even more stuff and using the day’s material to find out new things, many of which have become topics that I have written about.
Early registration to the courses attracts a 15% discount, but using the promotion code SQLH you will get a 20% discount instead. On the full Immersion course that is a further ~100 euros off the price, which can’t be bad.
The Immersion event is running from the 28th June to 1st July, and registration is here.
The two additional master classes are being run the week after, and these are advertised as being material that is not on the Immersion course, but as mentioned – I’m not entirely sure what that is, and given how much detail is on the immersion course, that is going to have to be some very deep internals stuff.
The performance master class is being run on the 5th and 6th of July, registration is here, whilst the DR master class registration is here. Where’s that cheque book?
Prodata SQL Academy Events
If you haven’t seen them advertised, Bob Duffy from Prodata is running a series of SQL Academy half day training session in Dublin, hosted at the Microsoft Auditorium in their offices in Leopardstown – the events are level 300 which suits the half day slot allocated for the sessions – yesterday’s was about performance tuning an optimisation so myself and a colleague took a short flight over and enjoyed the excellent Irish hospitality. The talk was recorded so there will no doubt be a webcast published at some point published by Technet in Ireland. The talk primarily went through using perfmon counters and wait states – and the available tools that can make this a lot easier by wrapping up and correlating results from different logging mechanisms.
I would recommend keeping an eye out for the cast when it appears, since troubleshooting a production environment is all about using non-intrusive means to understand what is crippling the systems – memory, cpu, IO etc. If you are not practised at this form of troubleshooting it is very difficult to know which performance counters and wait states to observe amongst the thousands that exist – as well as which DMV’s can give you the critical information to diagnose the problems. (It was quite interesting that the demonstration performance issue he was looking at was fundamentally a combination of a missing index but more critically was a lack of query parameterisation since it was in simple mode. The counters used to diagnose this problem, and the symptoms that you might encounter I have previously written about.)
The wait-state side of the talk was very interesting, I often use a combination of DMV’s and perfmon in the field to diagnose, but have only used a certain amount of the wait-state information and do not delve into it as deeply – I will definitely be adding a few more wait states to the list for the future.
The next event is on February 16th and covers SQL Analysis Services – registration is already open.
SQL Fascination 