I’m pleased to announce that SQL Internals Viewer 1.0 has been released. It can be downloaded from www.sqlinternalsviewer.com.
I've also put up the first part of a user guide that covers the main window and Allocation Map. The second part will follow shortly which will cover the Page Viewer. The user guide is available here.
If you've got an existing version installed it will need to be removed through Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features in Control Panel.
New features
Encode and Find is a new feature in the Page Viewer that allows you to encode a value to a particular data type and then search for it in the page. It can be accessed using the Page – Encode and Find menu item or the button on the toolbar.
There’s also a new feature on the hex viewer so that once you’ve found the data you are looking for you can select the record that it is contained in. This can be done by right clicking on the byte and selecting Select Record.
SQL Server 2008 Page and Row Compression
The Page Viewer can display the new SQL Server 2008 Page and Row compression row structures, including the CI (Compression Information) structure.
At the moment the application only supports data pages.
Key
There is a new improved version of the Key for the allocation map.
Clicking on an item on the Key will highlight it on the Allocation Map and fade the other items. Clicking on it again will clear the select.
Improvements
There have been several bug fixes and performance fixes, including improvements to the load times for databases.
Clicking on the Allocation Map will open the page in the current Page Viewer. To open the page in a new Page Viewer hold down the shift button and click on the page. There are more details of the new changes in the User Guide.
SQL Server 2008 Support
There is still work to be done to get Internals Viewer working will all of the latest features of SQL Server 2008, including Page and Row compression on indexes and sparse columns. It’s something I’m working on at the moment and I hope to release in the next few months.