SpurData Blog

Attached are the PowerPoint and scripts from my "T-Log First: How SQL Server storage (should) affect your Disk Architecture & T-SQL Design" presentation. This was first shown at the February 21st, 2012 Tulsa SQL meeting. This walks through the very basics of Write-Ahead Logging in SQL Server, how the Transaction Log file is written to differently from the Data file, and how all that naturally leads to the hardware best practices that you always hear and wonder about as a SQL newbie. There's also a demo script that further proves how you can manipulate transaction log writes for improved performance. After I gave my presentation I discovered that Tim Chapman described this process much more succinctly a few years ago in the "explicit transactions" section of his optimization article: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/optimize-sql-server-queries-with-these-advanced-tuning-techniques/179 Consider this further validation :^) Thanks to all the folks

If you're trying to apply SQL 2005 SP4 (or any SQL service pack), and it's failing, and you're seeing error "MSP Error:  29537  SQL Server Setup has encountered the following problem: [Microsoft][SQL Native Client][SQL Server]Invalid object name 'MSreplication_subscriptions'", then you've hit this bug which Microsoft is currently saying they "Won't Fix": https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/521231/failure-during-server-script-upgrade-process-on-database-in-sp-vupgrade-replication-procedure#tabs Probably you've done one of 2 things: You're using synonyms that match the system replication table names You've got some vestige replication tables laying around in one of your old databases My case was the latter. The fix was to find the vestige tables and get rid of them. I found them using the following script: [sourcecode language="sql"] /* This will detect db's containing vestiges of Replication