As some of you may know, I am writing a new book called High Performance Index Maintenance. As an experiment within the SQL Server community, I have been asking for DBAs to provide feedback on the books contents.
In my first blog about this topic, I asked people to provide me feedback on the book’s outline. I got a total of 7 people who reviewed my outline and provided feedback. I found this very useful, and the book will be better because of this feedback.
I want to continue this experiment, by occasionally blogging about what I am writing about in the book, and getting your feedback on it.
For example, as DBAs, we all know what an extent is, or do we? As part of an introductory chapter I am writing for the book, I wanted to give a short, succinct definition of what an extent is.
You would think that this would be easy to do, but I did some digging around (because I like to verify my facts) and got two different answers. For example, the SQL Server 2008 Books Online says that an extent is “a collection of eight physically contiguous pages. Then I went to a well-known reference book on SQL Server internals and found this definition: “An extent is made up of eight logically contiguous pages.”
OK, so which is it? Is an extent a collection of eight physical or logical pages?
Tell me what you think, and why. Once I get your feedback, then I’ll share with you what I think the definition should be.
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