I don’t blog anymore, but not because I work at Microsoft
Last year I had a health scare that got my blood pressure at 200-and-something over 100-and-something, soon to be wired up to an IV drip, put through a CT scanner, and a couple of weeks…
Join me at the EightKB virtual conference on 28 July 2021
Next week on Wednesday 28 July 2021, I will be presenting a brand-new session titled “How SQL Server stores that data type” for the free EightKB virtual conference. I’ve made it a 500-level talk, as…
How SQL Server stores data types: DATETIMEOFFSET
If you’d like to check out the previous instalment in this series on storing dates and times, click here. I avoided mentioning this data type because I didn’t think a lot of people used it,…
T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #007: Summertime in the SQL
This is the seventh post in my retrospective attempt to answer every T-SQL Tuesday invitation. In the beginning of June 2010, Jorge Segarra invited us to write about our favourite hot new feature in SQL…
How SQL Server stores data types: sql_variant
This post looks at a curious data type that isn’t really a data type. Instead, sql_variant tries to be all things to all people. As with most things in life, it has a few shortcomings…
How SQL Server stores data types: XML
This week we’re looking at how the database engine stores the XML data type in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. If you would like to read about storage of other data types, here are the…
The final word on storage for DATETIME2
Two years ago I wrote a post that got a lot of traction in the comments at the time. Last month there was renewed interest because one of the commenters noted that the official SQL…
How SQL Server stores data types: UNIQUEIDENTIFIER
This week we’re looking at how the database engine stores GUIDs (globally unique identifiers), specifically known as UNIQUEIDENTIFIER in SQL Server. If you would like to read about storage of other data types, here are…
How SQL Server stores data types: floating points
In this post we are looking at how SQL Server stores floating point values (FLOAT and REAL). If you’d like to read the previous posts in this series of how SQL Server stores data types,…
How should I store currency values in SQL Server?
On Twitter, Michael Dyrynda writes: ⚠️ Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever…
How SQL Server stores data types: money
In this post we look at how SQL Server stores currency values using the MONEY and SMALLMONEY data types. If you’d like to read the previous posts in this series of how SQL Server stores…
How SQL Server stores data types: integers and decimals
This week we’re going to look at how numbers are stored. This post will cover integers (TINYINT, SMALLINT, INT, BIGINT), and decimals (DECIMAL, which is the same as NUMERIC). If you’d like to read the…
How SQL Server stores data types: dates and times
This post dives into how SQL Server stores date and time data types in memory and on disk. But first, a note about endianness: CPUs manufactured by Intel and other vendors process binary values in…
SQL Server 2019 on Docker no longer runs as root by default
In my home lab I have an Ubuntu virtual machine that runs both SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server 2019 in Docker containers.
After SQL Server 2019 Release Candidate 1 was released, when I performed my usual migration to get the latest version, I noticed that the command line for the SQL Server instance was different.
I used sudo docker ps -a --no-trunc to see the full command, which is emulated below (note: this output is heavily abbreviated).
Accelerated Database Recovery in SQL Server 2019: Choose your own filegroup for the version store
An exciting new feature in SQL Server 2019 is Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR). Resulting from a combination of magic beans and smart software developers (I might be wrong about the beans), there is a good…