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I saw this report that a good percentage of online social media users (27%) find that their offline relationships benefit from online interaction. I think that’s true, and I bet that the SQL Server people I follow would agree. I think the online posts among us leading up the Summit helped us become more engaged once we arrived in person. Especially with SQL Karaoke.

However I don’t think this is anything new. As I’ve read accounts of people’s lives from history, it seemed that those that engaged in writing letters, the offline communication of the past, were often very social in public. They kept engaged with their friends and family with these delayed communications over time.

That’s essentially what we do with IM, Facebook, Twitter, etc., it’s just at a quicker pace. I’m sure Abraham Lincoln would have liked to engage with Mary when he was on the road, or his Secretary of State, Seward, or his Secretary of the Treasury, Chase, with a telephone or Twitter if they had been available. As it was, he spent many nights awaiting word of what was happening in his country in the telegraph room.

I think social media has a place in today’s world, and in your career. It’s a way to interact with others that aren’t physically located near you. And while it can be a time sink or a drain on your resources, it can also be very rewarding in growing relationships with other professionals.

It happens, not often, but I do regularly see people talking about their tempdb growing too large. Often that means that people have not properly sized tempdb to me, but there could be legitimate reasons why it’s grown large.

This is one reason that I’d like to see a separate tempdb for each database, a way that would allow us to better understand what level of resource usage is needed by a particular database.

So how do you determine what’s using tempdb? I found this great entry in Books Online, Troubleshooting Insufficient Disk Space in tempdb, that contains a bunch of queries to help you determine what’s wrong. There’s one to get the free space

SELECT SUM(unallocated_extent_page_count) AS [free pages], 
(SUM(unallocated_extent_page_count)*1.0/128) AS [free space in MB]
FROM sys.dm_db_file_space_usage;

and one that finds the longest running transaction

SELECT transaction_id
FROM sys.dm_tran_active_snapshot_database_transactions 
ORDER BY elapsed_time_seconds DESC;

and one that looks at the usage by session

CREATE VIEW all_task_usage
AS 
    SELECT session_id, 
      SUM(internal_objects_alloc_page_count) AS task_internal_objects_alloc_page_count,
      SUM(internal_objects_dealloc_page_count) AS task_internal_objects_dealloc_page_count 
    FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage 
    GROUP BY session_id;
GO

There are a few more, but if you’re wondering what’s happening in tempdb, this is a good article to go through and use some of these queries to diagnose what’s happening on your instance.

It pours.

I come back from 4 days unwired, a bunch of writing done, to a laptop that’s head, a site that won’t take posts, and a ton of email and articles.

At least my external HDD reader is reading the drive. I’m copying stuff off now, but it’s not a good day for me in the computer world.

Looks like I need a new laptop, but with cyber Monday, it seems that so many sites are down. I can’t get the HP or Lenovo sites to respond.

Grrrrrrr

I didn’t have Internet access for 4 days while we were in the mountains. Actually I could have purchased it, but for uploading blogs it didn’t seem like a great idea. Plus I’d be tempted to work if I did that.

So I did some offline blogging, but for the most part did nothing but hang out. It was good to get away, but lots of work today.