When Page Prefetching Takes a Back Seat – Exploring Trace Flag 652 in SQL Server

Learn how a trace flag affects SQL Server reading from disk and where this might be a useful thing for you to enable.

The Internals of Writing a Page

Sparse Column Storage

What happens when we drop a column on a SQL Server table? Where's my space?

You have dropped a column and wondering why you haven't recovered any space? Let's take a look.

Identify Tables With Dropped Columns

How easily can we find tables with dropped columns that need cleanup?

Tempdb Pages

Understanding CRUD Operations on Tables with B-tree Indexes, Page-splits, and Fragmentation

Introduction Every DML transaction reads the data before it makes any changes. Not only during a SELECT query, but when you run any DML statement, insert, update, or delete, SQL Server first fetches a bunch of pages into the buffer pool locating the desired rows and changes them while synchronously writing to the transaction log […]

Understanding CRUD Operations Against Heaps and Forwarding Pointers

In this article, we examine how data changes are made against heaps.

Understanding the Internals of a Data Page

In Part 1 of this series, we examine the structure of data pages and how your tables are stored on these pages.

Heap Order