Memory check which tables are loaded into memory

Great tip here for analysing whether you are over stretching your memory in SQL. The root of the issue is that clustered indexes are loaded into memory (the whole table is loaded) in order to query. Should your table be of a significant size, then all of your memory (or more) may be required to load a primary index in for querying. The solution to this is to remove the clustered index - this may equate to higher disk i/o however since the size of the index is smaller it may be able to load into memory anyhow.

A check for table memory usage is as follows:

SELECT sys.tables.name TableName,
sum(a.page_id)*8 AS MemorySpaceKB,
SUM(sys.allocation_units.data_pages)*8 AS StorageSpaceKB,
CASE WHEN SUM(sys.allocation_units.data_pages) <> 0 THEN
SUM(a.page_id)/CAST(SUM(sys.allocation_units.data_pages) AS NUMERIC(18,2))
END AS 'Percentage Of Object In Memory'
FROM (SELECT database_id, allocation_unit_id, COUNT(page_id) page_id FROM
sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors GROUP BY database_id, allocation_unit_id) a
JOIN sys.allocation_units ON a.allocation_unit_id =
sys.allocation_units.allocation_unit_id
JOIN sys.partitions ON (sys.allocation_units.type IN (1,3)
AND sys.allocation_units.container_id = sys.partitions.hobt_id)
OR (sys.allocation_units.type = 2 AND sys.allocation_units.container_id
= sys.partitions.partition_id)
JOIN sys.tables ON sys.partitions.object_id = sys.tables.object_id
AND sys.tables.is_ms_shipped = 0
WHERE a.database_id = DB_ID()
GROUP BY sys.tables.name

For further information on this and perfmon settings, look here

TFS Event Subscription

Finally got round to looking into this. Firstly, the next iteration of the 2008 Power Tools will introduce a nicer interface for the maintenance of event subscriptions. However, that is not due quite yet so in the meantime there are two tools to fill the gap.

The TfsAlert tool provides a system tray app that balloon tips whenever events change. It monitors 8 different events, and allows filtering. The interface for filtering is to edit the config file, so knowledge of syntax is required. However, that syntax can be built by the next tool.

The second tool is TFS Event Subscription and is a GUI builder for event subscription strings. This allows you to subscribe to a particular event and get a message sent by SOAP, PlainText or EmailHTML. This is a standard feature of TFS, however this interface can be run on a client and is a great deal easier to use compared to command line.

Lastly, this blog provides details on how to amend the emails sent by TFS to point to the TFS Web Access for the work item, rather than a summary report.

Common SQL Server errors and failures

Blatant link, but very useful : Common SQL Server failures and errors