Clik here to view.
Thread Synchronisation in SQL Server
Any code optimized for highly concurrent workloads must worry about thread synchronization. SQL Server is no exception, because in a database system, synchronization is one of the core functionalities...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Running Many Batch Statements in Parallel
When designing highly scalable architectures for modern machines, you will often need to do some form of manual parallelism control. Managing this is not always easy, but in this blog I will give you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Big/Big Table Joins
With the popularity of my last blog entry on Dangerous Joins, I felt inspired to write a bit more about the join strategies. Thanks for participating and reading, there seems to be a large appetite for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Synchronisation in .NET– Part 1: lock(), Dictionaries and Arrays
As part of our tuning efforts at Livedrive, I ran into a deceptively simple problem that beautifully illustrates some of the scale principles I have been teaching to the SQL Server community for years....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Synchronisation in .NET– Part 2:Unsafe Data Structures and Padding
In the previous blog post we saw how the lock() statement in .NET scales very poorly when there is a contention on a data structure. It was clear that a performance logging framework that relies on an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Synchronisation in .NET– Part 3: Spin Locks and Interlocks/Atomics
In the previous instalments (Part 1 and Part 2) of this series, we have drawn some conclusions about both .NET itself and CPU architectures. Here is what we know so far: When there is contention on a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Running SQL Server on a Big Box–Introduction
I have previously blogged about my best practices for installing a SQL Server. This guidance applies to all the boxes I work with. However, I think that some special attention is warranted when it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Running SQL Server on a Big Box – Configuration
In this next instalment of the big box blog series I will provide some guidance on how you configure a big box for best performance. I have previously blogged about my standard guidance for SQL Server...
View Article