Author: Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal explains the unlikelihood that you’d run out of bigints in a table:

So with 1 million rows per second, you’ll be generating 1 million x 3,600 (seconds in an hour) x 24 (hours in a day) = 86.4 billion rows per day, so you’ll need about 1.4 terabytes of new storage per day. If you’re using the bigint identity as a cluster key, each row needs new space, so you’ll need almost exactly 0.5 petabytes of new storage every year.

At that rate, actually running out of bigint values AND storing them would take roughly 150 thousand petabytes. This is clearly impractical – especially when you consider that storing *just* a bigint is pretty pointless – you’d be storing a bigint and some other data too – probably doubling the storage necessary, at least.

By contrast, if you have a staging table that flows 10 million rows a day (meaning 10 million leave and 10 million new ones enter), you’ll overflow an int column in less than a year.  It’s worth thinking about data sizes before deciding on the type of a surrogate key.  Bigint is the safest, and if you think you’ll need it, go with it.  But there is that storage overhead.

Derek Colley shows what to do when trying to connect to a named instance without specifying its name:

This is a good question.  There’s a few ways to address it:

• We could configure two different connection strings and on failover, the alternative is used (by any arbitrary application mechanism)
• For mirroring, we can use the Failover Partner= element in the connection string – but this is transactional replication being used for DR, and failover should be manual
• We could set the instance names to be the same – however in this case it was too late since changing the instance name cleanly in SQL Server is practically impossible and breaks all sorts of things

None of these solutions was suitable.  However, on each server, there was only one named instance and no default instance.  What can we do?

Read on for a fourth solution.

Arun Sirpal demonstrates what the Pause option does on a SQL Server:

As stated via official Microsoft documentation “Pausing the Database Engine service prevents new users from connecting to the Database Engine, but users who are already connected can continue to work until their connections are broken. Use pause when you want to wait for users to complete work before you stop the service. This enables them to complete transactions that are in progress”.

Very handy! Let’s see it in action and compare it to a STOP.

Read on for more.