A Peek Inside: Allocation. What is it? Why is it important?

Recently I have been getting some questions about an earlier post that I did around how the PowerPivot inactivity unloading is done. see http://powerpivotgeek.com/2010/03/04/a-peek-inside-unloading-powerpivot-data/ for more details. Surely there must be a faster mechanism for unloading data – and there is – but to fully discuss that aspect of the system we need to take a step back and talk about how databases get loaded in the first place. I don’t mean the actual loading process (that is another interesting post that I’ll do later on), what I mean is how PowerPivot decides to load something to begin with . . . and where it decides to load it.

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