Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Where did my SQL Server Memory go?


In managing one of my servers I had to make sure everything was running the way it should. I am working on fairly big databases (in the order of 10s of gigabytes) and I wanted to make sure SQL is using all the memory it has available.

The server I am working on is an x64 windows 2003 enterprise running SQL 2005 enterprise 32 bit. The server is also equipped with 12GB of ram.
Whenever I would look into the task manager or the performance monitor the only memory allocation I see for SQL server is around 202 MB which makes no sense.
If you look at the screen capture enclosed you can see the memory allocation for SQL server.
I did some research on the subject and found the answer. SQL has a dynamic management view called sys.dm_os_memory_clerks. This view described in http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175019.aspx has detailed memory allocation information for SQL server. When you examine this view you can see a column that details AWE memory allocations that are detailed in the awe_allocated_kb column, in my case this was summed to the 10GB I assigned to the server. There are other useful rows columns in the view and they are documented in the technet article mentioned here.
One useful query i run constantly:

SELECT
SUM(awe_allocated_kb)/1024 AS [AWE_MEM_MB],
SUM(virtual_memory_reserved_kb)/1024 AS [VM_RES_MB],
SUM(virtual_memory_committed_kb)/1024 AS [VM_COM_MB],
SUM(shared_memory_reserved_kb)/1024 AS [SM_RES_MB],
SUM(single_pages_kb )/1024 [SNG_PAGE_MB],
SUM(multi_pages_kb )/1024 [MLT_PAGE_MB]
FROM sys.dm_os_memory_clerks
This returns the memory allocation totals in megabytes.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Running C# and VB.Net Code on Microsoft SQL Server - Slides code and database

Thanks for coming to the November PSSUG Meeting at Microsoft.
All and all it went pretty well with a couple of Visual Studio crashes, SQL server acting funky but that comes with the territory.
As promised the code is available by clicking below:
Code, database and slides from Running C# and VB.Net Code on Microsoft SQL Server talk
I had to remove the ANTLR part of the demo since there are IP issues involved.
To get this running extract the zip file to drive c:\
it will create a folder c:\SQL_CLR
Attach the database in c:\SQL_CLR\db to sql server
You can look at a word document in c:\SQL_CLR\powerpoint\ for instructions to run the demo.
The slides are in c:\SQL_CLR\powerpoint\ also.
To run the solution open:
C:\SQL_CLR\SimpleFunctions\SimpleFunctions.sln
Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!
Sagi