Over the last few months, I've discussed how SQL Server 2005 keeps track of
storage space that tables and indexes use and that the new metadata structures
are a bit more complex than those in SQL Server 2000, but also offer greater
flexibility. In "Managing Data Space," June 2006, InstantDoc ID 50009, I explain
that each table (or index) can have data stored in three different forms: regular
IN_ROW data, large object (LOB) data, and row-overflow (ROW_OVERFLOW) data,
which is new in SQL Server 2005.You might find the row-overflow capability particularly
useful if you have tables containing multiple variable-length columns, whose
total size is usually within the maximum row size of 8060 bytes but may occasionally
exceed that. Let's take a closer look at how SQL Server works with the new row-overflow
data.
Bigger Rows
The new ability to store some of a row's data off the actual data page is the
first change in the maximum row length that we've seen since SQL Server 7.0.
In SQL Server 7.0, the size of data pages changed from 2K to 8K. Along with
the increase in page size, the maximum size of a data row increased correspondingly:
In SQL Server 7.0, the maximum row size increased to 8060 bytes from 1962 bytes
in SQL Server 6.5. Both of these maximum-size values include several bytes of
overhead stored with the row on the physical pages, so that the total size of
all the table's defined columns needed to be slightly less than the maximum
size. In fact, SQL Server 2005 changed the error message you get if you try
to create a table with rows that exceed the maximum, which in some cases (as
you'll see shortly) is still limited to the same maximum that it was in SQL
Server 2000. For example, in SQL Server 2005, if you execute the CREATETABLE
statement in Listing 1, using column definitions
that add up to exactly 8060 bytes, you'll get the error message that Figure
1 shows. (Note that the error messages and some code lines in this article
wrap to multiple lines because of space constraints.)
In this message, you can see the number of overhead bytes (7) that SQL Server
2005 wants to store with the row itself and realize that for some rows, the
previous size limit still applies. SQL Server 2005 stores only variable-length
columns in the special row-overflow pages, and only if all the fixed-length
columns will fit into the regular IN_ROW data limit.The table in Listing
1 has all fixed-length columns.
Now let's look at a table that has all variable-length columns. Run the code
in Listing 2 to create a table with rows
that have a maximum defined length of much greater than 8060 bytes. In fact,
if you ran this CREATETABLE statement on SQL Server 7.0, you'd get an error
and the table wouldn't be created at all. In SQL Server 2000, the table will
be created, but you'll get a warning.Although my columns are all varchar, varbinary,
nvarchar and sql_variant columns, columns that use the (CLR) user-defined types
can potentially also be stored on row-overflow data pages.
As you see when you run the code in Listing
2, you get no such warning in SQL Server 2005. If you then insert a row
that has variable-length columns with sizes that add up to more than 8060 bytes,
the row in the statement in Listing 3 will
be successfully inserted.
Where's My Data?
To determine whether SQL Server is storing any data in row-overflow data pages
for a particular table, we can use the DBCC IND command, which I discuss in
detail in "Index Internal Information," January 2005, InstantDoc ID 44572.The
SQL Server 2005 version of DBCC IND returns three additional columns that reflect
the new structures, including partitions and row-overflow data. These three
new columns are PartitionNumber, PartitionID, and iam_chain_type. iam_chain_type
describes the type of data stored on the page and has one of these values: in-row
data, row-overflow data, or LOB data.
The script in Listing 4 creates a new table,
similar to one I created in "Index Internal Information," to hold the rows that
DBCC IND returns. Note that the characters sp_ at the beginning of an object
name in the master database mean that the object can be accessed from any database
without qualifying it with the source database name. DBCC IND returns one row
for each page belonging to a specified table or index. The following statement
runs DBCC IND on the bigrows table and saves the result in sp_table_pages:
INSERT INTO sp_table_pages
exec ('dbcc ind
( tempdb, bigrows, -1)' )
To see only relevant columns from the output—PageFID (the page's file ID), PagePID (the page ID), iam_chain_type, and pageType—you can run this statement:
SELECT PageFID, PagePID,
iam_chain_type, pageType
FROM sp_table_pages
Table 1 shows the output for the previous statement. (The actual page numbers
you get will most likely be different.) In the DBCC IND output, both row-overflow
pages and LOB pages come back with a pageType value of 3; thus we also need
to see the iam_chain_type value to identify whether the page is row-overflow
or LOB data. Index Allocation Map (IAM) pages report the same iam_chain_type
value as the type of page they're keeping track of, and we need the pageType
value to see the 10 that indicates an IAM page.The output in Table 1 shows that
there's one page of regular in-row data, with its IAM page, and one page of
row-overflow data,with its IAM page.
SQL Server stores variable-length columns on row-overflow pages only under certain conditions. The determining factor is the length of the row itself. It doesn't matter how full the regular page is into which SQL Server is trying to insert the new row. SQL Server will construct the row normally, and only if the row itself needs more than 8060 bytes will some of its columns be stored off the row and on the overflow pages. Each column in the table is either completely on the row or completely off the row.This means that a 4000-byte variable-length column can't have half its bytes on the regular data page and half on a row-overflow page. If a row is less than 8060 bytes and there's no room on the page where SQL Server is trying to insert it, SQL Server will apply its usual page-splitting algorithms.
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