In the next series of posts, I'll focus on SQL Server I/O, revisiting some common issues and taking a closer look at some others. In each post and as always, I'll make the case with specific data points from my tests. For the first two posts in this series, let me check out the read-ahead technique used by SQL server. Read-ahead is an important ...

Andrew Kelly in a recent post here advised visiting/revisiting the SQL Server I/O basics, and I completely agree. A firm grasp of the basics can make it easy to understand some system behaviors that otherwise may be puzzling at times. A question that is often asked is how SQL Server performs the I/O writes in its checkpoints. ...