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I am in doubt whether I should spend time for installing, studying and using "Internals Viewer for SQL Server"
What are the most helpful practical uses to convince me to use it for SQL Server perforamnce tuning, troubleshooting or database design?

Gennady Vanin Геннадий Ванин
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  • +1 because I think it is a good question, and I wonder why a brave anonymous gave it a -1, without any explanation. – iDevlop Nov 22 '10 at 12:14
  • @iDevlop, thanks, they are too many. I do not mind, I would have proposed showing downvotes and upvotes because I have too many posts with a dozen of votes and final score of 0 which is worse than a negative one (it is more like nothing and no iterest to anyone whatsoever). – Gennady Vanin Геннадий Ванин Nov 22 '10 at 13:04

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The feature list is on the link you gave.

  • Allocation Map
    • Displays the physical layout of tables and indexes
    • Displays PFS status
    • Overlay pages in the Buffer Pool
  • Page Viewer
    • Displays Data pages including forwarding records and sparse columns
    • Displays Index pages
    • Displays allocation pages (IAM, GAM, SGAM, DCM, and BCM pages)
    • Displays pages with SQL Server 2008 row and page compression

If you are interested in these areas then it beats messing around with DBCC PAGE in my opinion.

A few examples of why you might want to use it are

  • Looking at the number of rows you are getting per data page.
  • Looking at the structure of indexes.
  • Understanding what happens when rows get updated, deleted, or inserted.
Martin Smith
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