In today's weblog post I want to talk about the NULL bitmap mask and some mysteries that you can encounter with it. The NULL bitmap mask encodes at the Storage Engine level which column stores a NULL value and which not. It's a simple bitmap mask, where a set bit… Read more

In today's weblog posting I want to talk about replaying SQL Server workloads with the RML Utilities. RML Utilities stands for Replay Markup Language Utilities and are provided by Microsoft as a free download. You can download them here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=7EDFA95A-A32F-440F-A3A8-5160C8DBE926. I have first encountered the RML Utilities when I… Read more

Yesterday we got confirmation from SQLPASS if our submitted sessions for the upcoming SQLPASSS summit in Seattle (October 11 – 14) were accepted. I’m very lucky to announce that my submitted session “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting” made it to the summit as a regular session (75min)! Here’s… Read more

The most amazing journey that I have done in the past years was definitely SQLcruise (see http://www.sqlcruise.com) – a SQL Server event organized and running by Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter). Without the speakers, and the sponsors we were 14 cruisers that were flying to Seattle across… Read more

As announced in both of my SQL Server sessions at DevConnections in Karlsruhe/Germany you can find here the slides & samples for download:

• SQL Server 2008 Database Internals
• SQL Server Execution Plans & Query Tuning

As also said yesterday, you get a 10% discount for my upcoming “Advanced SQL Server… Read more