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SQL Server 2008: Day 1
By farseeker | August 12, 2008
First cab off the rank: Management Console. I’m interested to see the changes here, because this is to be honest, most people’s window into the SQL Server. Sure some people like to go hardcore and script everything, but more normal people use the GUI for day to day tasks.
First task: Attach an SQL Server 2005 MDF directly to the 2008 instance. The database in question is a reasonable 24gb database with 320 tables, and two (differently) massive tables. One table with 98 columns and 50,000 rows and one table with 12 columns and 11 million records. I have another behemoth of a table in another database that has 760,000 records and 95 columns but I’ll leave that for another day I think.
Attaching was very straight forward. Compatibility for the database was automatically set to 90 (2005) and it all worked out of the box. Nice to see.
The activity monitor is where I spent a lot of my troubleshooting time, and I’m pleased to see that it’s a proper activity monitor now – not just a collection of meaingless data. No more running server traces or logging WMI data just to find out which queries/SPIDs are hogging the system resources. To have all the expensive queries at my fingertips is going to be a brilliant tool.
Previously in the past to achieve that sort of detail we’ve had to run a server trace (that’s a process that keeps track of every single query that comes into the server and logs all sorts of details about it), watch a graph of WMI data to see when resource utilisation goes through the roof and then wait for the trace data to be imported into a table so we can review exactly what the hell happened.
Resource Govener is what I’m really glad to see. I shall look forward to playing with this in GREAT detail when I get a chance. It allows you to set resource access permissions based on groups, so that certain users/processes can only consume a certain amount of resources. This means that people who love to run reports can be restricted to say 50% utilisation (on an 8-way server that should be plenty) so that they don’t hog it all from other users.
This Data Warehousing thing looks interesting as well. I’ve never done any warehouse stuff before, so it might be worth a play later on.
The online help is typical:
As you can probably tell this morning has been just browsing around and seeing what one can find. Hopefully I’ll do some more in-depth testing later, but I really should get back to work now.
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