Mark S. Rasmussen improve.dk
Jun 01
2012

I presented two sessions at this years NT Konferenca. It was my first NTK, and what an NTK it was! I’m really hoping I’ll be back to present again – I’ve been to Slovenia many times before on non-technical visits, and now I’ve been able to confirm that they sure know how to run their conferences and cater for the attendees and speakers :)

Apr 02
2012

As usual, I had a wonderful time at SQLBits X in London. Unfortunately I didn’t arrive until late Friday afternoon since I was flying in at the last minute from SQLConnections. I did however make it to the fabulous party and managed to get in bed early enough so I could be ready for my presentation on Saturday.

Mar 29
2012

I presented my “Optimizing Storage and Performance Using Page and Row Compression” presentation today here at SQLConnections. Overall I think it went alright, even though I had to speed up a bit at the end due to lack of time – I really hope I’ll be able to get a 75 minute slot next time :)

Mar 27
2012

Just before departing for SQLConnections in Vegas and SQLBits in London, I got notified that I’ve been selected for two presentations at the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, June 6-8th!

Feb 29
2012

While implementing compression support for OrcaMDF, it stumped me when I discovered that integers (including datetime, money and all other type based on integers) were stored in big endian. As all other integers are stored in little endian and I couldn’t see why they’d want to change it, I assumed it must’ve been due to using different libraries or something to that extent.

Feb 20
2012

I’ve done it myself, worried about what to do when I exhausted my bigint identity value. I was worried that part of the LSN being a bigint – what would happen when it ran out? Would it perform an integer overflow? The answer? Worrying about exhausting the range of a bigint is not something you should spend time on. Allow me to elaborate.

Feb 17
2012

I’ve previously written on why I don’t want to rely on third party GUIs for managing my AWS services. Assuming I’ll be interacting with AWS through the SDK later on, I much prefer doing the initial setup using the SDK as well, to ensure I fully understand what I’ve done. In previous posts, I’ve shown full console application examples on how to use the SDK for various tasks; however, creating a console application project, compiling and running it can be kind of cumbersome, especially if you’re just doing some quick testing or API exploration.

Feb 13
2012

So what’s a multiplexer you ask? A multiplexer is an integrated circuit that takes a number of inputs and outputs a smaller number of outputs. In this case we’re aiming at creating a 4-to-1 multiplexer. As the name implies, it takes four inputs and outputs exactly one output, determined by a select input. Depending on the number of input lines, one or more select lines may be required. For 2n input lines, n select lines are needed. In hardware terms, this is basically the simplest of switches.

Jan 30
2012

While working on row compression support for OrcaMDF, I ran into some challenges when trying to parse integers. Contrary to normal non-compressed integer storage, these are all variable width – meaning an integer with a value of 50 will only take up one byte, instead of the usual four. That wasn’t new though, seeing as vardecimals are also stored as variable width. What is different however is the way the numbers are stored on disk. Note that while I was only implementing row compression, the integer compression used in page compression is exactly the same, so this goes for both types of compression.