Danny Gould, created a tool to graphically display database storage internals, and seeing how data is physically allocated, organised and stored - the SQL Internals Viewer.

AND, with some interesting benefits:

• Encode and Find - to encode a value to a particular data type and then search for it in the page
• SQL Server 2008 Page and Row Compression
• Key - Clicking on an item on the Key will highlight it on the Allocation Map

• Physical Stats nodes - information about sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats

• SQL Editor - includes a view on the Transaction Log
• ... and more!

All things considered - it`s a very, very nice tool!

For more information, visit http://www.sqlinternalsviewer.com/.

CU tosc