Fat! That’s how you’d have to describe most databases these days. Gigabytes piled on megabytes until the terabytes add up and up. In one way, we think of disk space as cheap. After all you can go down to the local office supply store or on-line and buy a terabyte drive for less than $80. But can you really use just that for a database? Not of you want to get the kind of performance, redundancy and disaster recovery that are demanded of today’s applications, so you use a SAN, or a multi-drive array or solid-state storage and pretty soon you’re spending some real money. Add it up: the SAN, the fiber network, SSD’s, the disaster recovery system, the development system, the QA system, backup space and the $taff to manage it all. Pretty soon that $100 terabytes turns into around $70,000. The Biggest Looser: Database Edition presentation shows you how to put your database on a diet using the features of SQL Server:

  • Compression
  • Filtered indexes
  • Maintenance, REBUILD and REORGANIZE
  • Index management: Do you really need all those indexes? Application Changes.

Topics include:

  • How to calculate the storage required for each row
  • How to measure the actual storage of each row
  • How to find hidden overhead such as Snapshot Isolation bytes\
  • How to recover extra space
  • Why NOT to SHRINK your database files
  • Why log files grow and how to keep them under controlHow to Shrink log files the right way
  • Rebuilding files to recover all the extra space

Here are the PPT of the slides and the zip of the examples to download.

[If you have the SQL PASS DVD’s It’s AD-200]