At 4/9/00 02:29 PM (Sunday), Jim Starkey wrote:

> >The summary is that finding a page for a large record in a big table can
> >actually be very expensive.
> >
>
>Actually not. The engine stores big records tail first on overflow pages
>until what's left fits on a page. Because the overflow pages aren't
>in the pointer page, the overhead for large records is not much more
>than linear on record size. Also many large records shrink during
>record compression (sure you don't think we store padded out fields,
>do you?).

I'm confused by the "stores big records tail first".

Does this mean, given page size of 4KB, that a record which has a final
size of 11K has the last 4K stored in a tail page, the 4K previous to that
stored in another tail page, and the previous 3K (the beginning of the
record) stored in a data page?