Changing a column's size is something that I see many DBAs just do without thinking about it. It seems that many DBAs assume this is a meta data change and you can just do it.
That's not the case as I've seen large tables lock up applications as the changes are made. However I've not seen a lot of testing on how performance is impacted by different changes. Ken Kaufman made some tests that I found interesting when looking at column changes.
Definitely worth a read.
A Petaflop
IBM is working on a petaflop supercomputer for the US Department of Energy. This is a computer that will perform 1 quadrillion operations per second, a number that .
Sun, Cray, SGI, and others are working towards this same goal, but IBM is taking an interesting approach in using the Cell CPUs that are in the Playstation 3 as well as regular AMD Opteron chips. This heterogeneous approach should use less power, always a good thing these days, reduce costs, and potentially make writing applications easier since they're working with well known x86 instructions and these lower cost chips can be used for the standard computing tasks.
This type of technology filters down to other applications and I wonder if we'll start to see any applications in the database world. Maybe we'll see a parallel SQL Server instance at some point that can better handle those large query tasks.
Digging Into Recursion
There are many people that don't really understand how recursion works, and with it's new possibilities with CTEs, I'd really encourage all DBAs to add this tool to their list of techniques to consider. It can be tricky, but there's a great blog post from Tony Rogerson, SQL Server MVP in the UK that you should read.
And in looking at other tools, compression is on many people's minds with the changes coming in SQL Server 2008. There are two great posts from Linchi Shea, another MVP, that look at Page Compression Ratios and insert performance that you should take a look at if you're considering compression in SQL Server 2008.
Steve Jones
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Steve's Pick of the Week
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Garden State Does for Green IT - Since I'm concerned about alternative energy and how our industry affects the world's requirements, I thought this was a good one. The decison to be more green is a financial one, but it's good to see governments thinking about this.
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The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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