April 2007 Blog Posts
We were having some disk drive performance issues at a client recently. They have a 6 drive array running RAID 10. We spent some time running SQLIO against the array. Our standard test was an 8KB random read with a queue depth of eight. The array was giving us 370 I/O operations per second with a latency of 42 ms. We cracked open the case and discovered it was using 7200 RPM SATA drives. We replaced the controller with the same model except that it was designed for SAS (serially attached SCSI) and installed six 15,000 RPM SAS drives. Running the...
Bob Ward finally posted the definitive answer on how to handle SP2 and it's releases and hotfixes. I wish the MS KB articles were written like this. Thanks Bob!
There was a post today in the MVP newsgroups that I needs much broader distribution. Written by James Howey of Microsoft it says: We recently posted updates to address an issue in two SP2 Maintenance Plan tasks. The KB article describes the symptoms as follows: FIX: The Check Database Integrity task and the Execute T-SQL Statement task in a maintenance plan may lose database context in certain circumstances in SQL Server 2005 In Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2), the following tasks in a maintenance plan may lose database context in certain circumstances: Check Database Integrity...
The client I'm at today has the best time for server upgrades. They do all their upgrades from Noon until 1PM on Tuesdays. I think I love them.
The joy that is SP2 just keeps on giving. Microsoft released a hotfix (KB934458) to bring it up to 3054: FIX: The Check Database Integrity task and the Execute T-SQL Statement task in a maintenance plan may lose database context in certain circumstances in SQL Server 2005 builds 3042 through 3053 This came down through Windows automatic updates. It was an 18MB package and took roughly 11 minutes on my laptop. There is also a fix (KB934459) in case you're running a higher build of SQL Server 2005 (3150 - 3158). I'm not sure exactly how these apply or...