Bytes and Bites of Internet
Archive for February, 2010
Installing IIS 7.5 on Windows 7
Feb 18th
I stumbled upon developers working with ASP.NET frequently as part of my work and sometimes even have to work on it by myself too. My recently purchased laptop came with Windows 7 which supports latest of Internet Information Services or say Servers from old days (IIS) of version 7.5. I’ve used it from v6 (experience on v5.1 wasn’t much pleasing) and this latest iteration, I must say is quite impressing. I should say Microsoft has understood requirement of market … Being The Most popular Web Server at present time APACHE, will surely face some serious fight from this mighty Server in near future … The advantage of using IIS over Apache as I see is, ability to use .NET and direct support for ASP.NET.
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SQL Server …. Getting to know It
Feb 15th
When you install SQL Server, there by default system databases are created. Which are, Master … MSDB … Model … and TempDB … and Resource DB, which is not visible through SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio). All of these DBs are there for specific reason and each has particular task to perform.
- Master DB:- As name suggests, its Master Puppeteer of the game. It has all the metadata of DBMS. Including Logins, Endpoints, Configurations and all sort of information that is required to run any instance.
- MSDB:- Job of this database is to keep Jobs !!! Well, it stores all information about SQL Server Agent and its jobs, history etc. Also if DTS/SSIS packages are deployed they are stored here as well .
SQL Server … Searching Tree !!!
Feb 9th
If by any chance you happen to know a little history of computers, you will be surprised that most of the early innovators had taken their primary field of study as Mathematics or Physics !!! At first glance, you may wonder what a mathematician is doing in field of computers right ?? But even if you read the word computer , it can be seen as a device that compute (or say calculate) stuffs .. right ? So, if you want to work at very low level (or say Machine level) you need to know very good math … or more precisely different algorithms. Computer itself is a machine which requires set of instructions to perform “any” task and to do that task , it always use algorithms (… now you know why ALGORITHM was core subject of CS right ?) … some of the algorithms like Store Algorithm, Sort Algorithm, Search Algorithm … but as long as you don’t want to develop your own OS with your own File System you don’t need to worry about it.
Here you may ask, what the hell it has to do with SQL Server ?? Fact is, these algorithms are not only used to store, search or sort data at OS but they are also used in any DBMS system and yes in SQL Server too. It is not like your carrier will end if you don’t know these algorithms but having idea of these algorithm can come handy when it comes to performance tuning or even will help you to understand, how SQL Server search, store/retrieve or sorts data physically.
SQL Server … Internals
Feb 3rd
Internal of DBMS consist of 5 core components , and we know that … it was more like logical structure … but the internals I am talking about here is how data is handled, or can say how data is read, write, stored physically specifically in SQL Server (I think Oracle does it a little differently). Knowledge of internal mechanism is very important because it provides us insight of how stuff works. It is very helpful when it comes to optimize / improve performance of DBMS as a whole system.
The little most physical chunk of storage device that is used to store data by storage engine is called PAGE and it is of 8KB in size (same size is used by ORACLE DBMS too)including 96 byte header which leaves about 8060 bytes of space for records. Its header contains sequence number of that page, and pointer to previous and next page. So we can say that, longer the row record fewer the entries in page and so more pages are required. Here one thing is to remember, Log files (.LDF) doesn’t contain data pages, it just contain series of log records.