AWE (Addressing Windows Extension) is one of the know server configuration to everyone. This parameter allows SQL Server to access large amount of memory in 32 bit machines. However MS decided to depreciate this configuration in SQL Server 2012 (Denali) . I hope this is the first step towards depreciating all 32 bit SQL server editions. So if you are using this setting in your current environment then you need to be careful while upgrading it to SQL Server 2012.

Denali CTP3 is already released and we have new DMV’s accompanied with this version which will be very useful for us. I’m going to cover the DMV that are all generic and not to a specific feature of Denali, I’ll will cover those DMV’s while writing article on that feature. There are around 8 DMV’s which I’m going to discuss it now.

In this article I will try and cover the concepts in understanding the amount of memory or buffers required for completing a database backup. I would be using a couple of trace flags to get that detail and further discuss two of the parameters MAXTRANSFERSIZE and BUFFERCOUNT in the BACKUP DATABASE TSQL syntax which will help us understand a bit more about memory consumption for a database backup and time involved in completing the backup.

DBCC CHECKDB & READ ONLY DATABASES:

Can you run a checkdb command on Read-only databases? If yes, does this get logged into boot page of the database? If checkdb finds an error can it fix on a read-only database?

These were some of the questions running through my mind as I manage some read-only databases in an SQL server which is mostly used for archiving and wanted to have the same level of checks and monitoring stuff we do an read write OLTP databases.

Last month Ive wrote an article on Performance Data Collector part one, I thought of writing part 2 soon however I was stuck with Organizing SQL Code Camp with my fellow MVP Deepak & Sugesh. Now its almost a month so thought of writing the second part. In this part we are going to see how to customize the data collection, retrieval of reports from PDW (Performance Data Warehouse) etc.