How SQL Server reads and writes pages
SQL Server Storage Engine
Five interactive pages about B+ tree indexes on disk: what's inside an 8 KB page, how a seek with key lookups walks two trees, how the lock manager decides who waits, a game where you execute statements by hand, and a platformer where every room is an index page.
1 Inside an 8 KB Page A to-scale byte map of a clustered and a nonclustered leaf page. Insert and delete rows to see compaction and page splits. 2 Key Lookup Walkthrough Step through an Index Seek plus Key Lookup one page read at a time, then find where the plan flips to a scan. 3 Lock Manager Walkthrough Six short stories of sessions competing for rows: S, U and X locks, intent locks, isolation levels, a blocking chain and a deadlock, each shown as locks, a wait-for graph and DMV rows. 4 Storage Engine Drill Twelve levels: seeks, INCLUDE, ranges, ORDER BY and TOP, writes, heaps, statistics, plan reuse, index design, joins, locks, and blocking and isolation. Plus Peak Load, an arcade mode where you keep a server alive through waves of live traffic. 5 Page Runner A platformer where every room is a B+ tree page. Drop through separator trapdoors, walk the leaf chain, run key lookups and split a full page and get out of a deadlock, scored in logical reads.