Category: Technology

  • SSDs and their impact on database servers

    Vadim Tkachenko published interesting benchmark results with PCI-E based SSDs here. I recently got a chance to benchmark FusionIO’s 320 GB PCI-E drive. It was really impressive. My results, done on Windows with sqlio, are consistent (not identical, of course, but in the same ballpark) with what Vadim reported in that blog post, done with…

  • Running external processes/programs with Python subprocess

    Note: It is good to know when the external process runs and for how long, which is included in the code snippet below. For the “when” part, it would have been nice to know the time zone as well. But due to the limitation mentioned here, it is not as easy as it sounds with…

  • Windows disk throughput benchmark steps with sqlio

    Credits to Linchi Shea, SQLServerPedia/Brent Ozar, and Jonathan Kehayias for their discussions on sqlio. Update: The test below, against one drive, can run for more than 1 hour. That is a long time. I’ve tested running 2 sqlio batch scripts against 2 locally attached drives, similar to the ones listed below, and found the results…

  • Parse sqlio log file with Python pyparsing

    A few weeks ago I posted some questions on 3 Python text processing modules: pyparsing, SimpleParse, and NLTK. Today I need to analyze a log file generated by sqlio. I decided to use pyparsing. I am pretty pleased with it. I am aware that there are at least 2 utility scripts for this: one is…

  • Utility script for instance level objects comparison between 2 SQL Server instances

    Useful for SQL Server upgrade and migration, instance consistency check in the enterprise, et cetera. Known assumptions: 1. pyodbc and proper SQL Server database driver setup and tested; 2. Windows Active Directory trusted connection to both instances. Login/password can also be used with very simple modification of the code; 3. Proper permission is set on…