Jen McCown

I had a guy at work tell me that he'd read about turning AWE on for 64bit SQL.  That sounded TOTALLY wrong to me, so I checked BOL, which says "AWE is not required and cannot be configured on 64-bit operating systems."  I got all self-satisfied, but then I thought, I'd better check with the internetz.

Thanks to Denny Cherry (@mrdenny on Twitter) for pointing me to a reputable resource: Bob Ward's most excellent CSS SQL Server Engineers article "Fun with Locked Pages, AWE, Task Manager, and the Working Set…". This in essence says that BOL is right in one sense: the sp_configure option for AWE makes absolutely no difference for 64-bit SQL. But you can get the effect of "locking pages" (not to be confused with page locks) by using the 'lock pages in memory' privilege set. (See also Bob's accompanying article Do I have to assign the Lock Pages in Memory privilege for Local System?). 

Edit: Here's a blog by Slava Oks that also addresses 64bit and AWE (thanks for the link goes to Mladen Prajdic)

Bottom line: AWE has NO effect on 64 bit systems! (And, you set "lock pages in memory" independently, if that's the behavior you're looking for.)

-Jen McCown

http://www.midnightdba.com/

Our first night in Seattle, we sat down with Allen White: sooooper geniussss, MVP, and Scalability Experts dude.  We talk about:

• Teaching SQL to Oracle people, and the major differences between the platforms.
• The answer to: What DB platform holds more corporate data than ANY other DB platform in the world? (You'll be surprised. I was.)
• Twitter (of course).
• The SIG challenge at past PASS Summits.
• The story of Allen and Sean's meeting.
• The worst thing he's ever done in a live SQL environment, and the guys' one-down worst thing stories.
• Powershell favorite features and wishlist. Plus a real world example of how Powershell is liquid awesome.
• Linked server FAIL. 

Video: Part 1 of 2, Part 2 of 2

Allen's Blog: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/allen_white/default.aspx

-Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

Just a quick announcement today: If you've been following along, you know that Sean and I did several interviews with SQL Server authors, MVPs, and bigwigs at the PASS Community Summit last week in Seattle.  Last night I published the first one, a nice long talk with Itzik Ben-Gan! Itzik writes for SQL Magazine and is a Solid Quality Mentor.  He's a regular speaker at all the major conventions, and you may have heard of a couple of his books (Amazon lists at least seven).  In this two part video, we hear him talk about:

• His maiden name 
• SQL structure 
• Complex SQL development process
• How he got into SQL, starting with his time in a beer factory
• The biggest mistakes he made in production environments
• Why "sequel" is wrong and "ess-Q-ell" is right, as far as ISO is concerned

Please go watch, and leave feedback, and let us know who else YOU would like us to interview! 

-Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com