Is it possible to see LOB (large object) logical reads from
STATISTICS IO
output on a table with no LOB columns?
I was asked this question today by someone who had spent a good fraction of their afternoon trying to work out why this was occurring — even going so far as to re-run DBCC CHECKDB
to see if corruption was the cause.
The table in question wasn’t particularly pretty. It had grown somewhat organically over time, with new columns being added every so often as the need arose.
Nevertheless, it remained a simple structure with no LOB columns — no text
or image,
no xml
, no max
types — nothing aside from ordinary integer
, money
, varchar
, and datetime
types.
To add to the air of mystery, not every query that ran against the table would report LOB logical reads — just sometimes — but when it did, the query often took much longer to execute.