Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Internals

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at how SQL Server 2008 stores data that doesn’t use the normal FixedVar record format and data that doesn’t fit into the normal 8-KB data page.

I discussed row-overflow and large object data, which is stored on its own separate pages, and filestream data, which is stored outside SQL Server, in files in the filesystem.

Some of the new storage capabilities in SQL Server 2008 require that we look at row storage in a completely different way. Sparse columns allow us to have very wide tables of up to 30,000 columns, so long as most of those columns are NULL in most rows. Each row in a table containing sparse columns has a special descriptor field that provides information about which columns are non-NULL for that particular ...