Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Internals

Chapter 7. Special Storage

Kalen Delaney

In Chapter 5, and Chapter 6, we discussed the storage of "regular rows" for both data and index information. I told you in Chapter 5 that regular rows are in a format called FixedVar. SQL Server provides ways of storing data in another format called Column Descriptor (CD). It also can store special values in either the FixedVar or CD format that don’t fit on the regular 8-KB pages. In this chapter, I’ll describe data that exceeds the normal row size limitations and is stored as either row-overflow or Large Object (LOB) data. I’ll tell you about two additional methods for storing data on the actual data pages, introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2008, one that uses a new type of complex column with a regular ...