This is the definitive guide to troubleshooting the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database engine, direct from the people who know it most intimately: the people who wrote it, designed it, and support it. SQL Server expert Ken Henderson, author of the best-selling Guru’s Guides to SQL Server, has assembled a “dream team” of SQL Server developers and support engineers to provide in-depth troubleshooting and diagnostic information that has never been documented before: information that would be impossible to get without access to Microsoft’s own source code. You’ll find comprehensive, in-depth chapters on

• Waiting and blocking
• Data corruption and recovery
• Memory
• Procedure cache issues
• Query processing
• Server crashes and other critical failures
• Service Broker
• SQLOS and scheduling
• tempdb
• Clustering

In a typical installation SQL Server stores its data in two files. One has an MDF extension and stores the data itself and the other has an LDF extension and stores the transaction log. You can configure SQL Server to have multiple data files and multiple transaction log files if you'd like but that's beyond the scope of this article. When SQL Server processes a transaction it goes through the following steps:

1. It writes what it's going to do to the transaction log.
2. It makes the change to the data file. This change is typically made on the in-memory copy of that portion of the data file.
3. It writes to the log that the transaction is committed.
4. The CHECKPOINT process writes the portion data file associated with the transaction to disk. This might happen anywhere from seconds to minutes after the step above.
5. It writes to the log that the transaction is "hardened".

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Reporting Services Makes Server Support Easier Reporting Services is one of the most widely used subsystems in SQL Server and there have been some very creative solutions invented by DBAs around the world. New author Carolyn Richardson is one of those, bringing us a implementation that tracks uptime and disk space for her SQL Servers

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