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Generating dimension data for dates
Most analytical and BI databases have date dimension table(s). One frequently needs to generate and populate such data. I present a solution below for such data generation, written in Python. Please use different database drivers/modules to connect to your specific database server (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) for data population. Notes: 1. It takes 2 […]
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Sysinternals and PAL
Sysinternals and PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) are two fantastic tools for general server information gathering and troubleshooting on Windows. Sysinternals suite is a set of tools that can be downloaded freely from Microsoft. One thing that is particularly attractive about them is that they can be run directly after downloading without special installation and […]
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Some SQL Server 2008 page compression observations
A few days ago I wrote about Infobright’s column-based storage engine, and compared the sizes of raw text data file, gzipped file, MyISAM files, and Infobright files. At that time, I also wanted to compare that against data compression in SQL Server 2008, which is a new feature. But the Windows cloud server instance I […]
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Data generation with TPC-H’s dbgen for load testing
2011-06-26 update: I am not sure if there are any changes in the latest make and gcc packages. Anyway, I noticed when run make, I encountered the message below: make: g: Command not found make: [qgen] Error 127 (ignored) To fix this, find where gcc is at, then created a symbolic link g that points […]
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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 […]