What are you talking about? No, we aren't talking about looking
inside the box. But have you ever wanted to see what the internals of
what SQL is doing. Well Danny Gould did and this is a little utility
he came up with to learn more about the internals and how data is
physically allocated, organized and stored.
Basically he has created a tool that takes all of the information
from Shared Global Allocation Map (SGAM), Global Allocation Map (GAM),
Index Allocation Map (IAM), Pages, Extents...and so on and creates a
graphical depiction of your memory. Then you can hover over that
visualization and it will tell you what that section of memory is
allocated to. Then if you want you can click on it and it will open
the Page Viewer which is a hex dump of the header information, data
dump, offset table and row interpretation. From there you can click
again and drill down to the various elements that make up a row,
including the internal structure and data values.
Check it out! SQL Internals Viewer