SQL Server Team Blog - Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:14
The O’Reilly Strata Conference On Making Data Work is less than a week away. The Microsoft BI team is featuring a blog series highlighting Microsoft’s Big Data vision and technologies. Today’s guest post is by Torsten Grabs, Principal Program Manager Lead for StreamInsight™ at Microsoft. Visit the Microsoft BI Official Blog for the detailed post. Learn more about our presence and sessions at Strata, happening February 28th through March 1st 2012 as well as Microsoft’s Big Data Solution here.
SQL Server Team Blog - Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:00
Successful companies do their best to stand out, to provide offerings of value and to balance quality, functionality and cost. Of course, as individual consumers, we understand that “new and improved” is no guarantee of practical, useful, simple and effective. So major product announcements keep most of us a bit skeptical ‘til we have a closer look. Sometimes we’ll be disappointed. Sometimes we may be both surprised and delighted. Microsoft is releasing SQL Server 2012 with an emphasis on important customer needs: “Mission Critical Confidence”, “Breakthrough Insight” and “Cloud on Your Terms”. All of this with flexibility and at scale. These messages respond to an accelerated business reality. Respond now to new demands. React now to threat
SQL Server Security - Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:22
Microsoft is working on a new Windows Azure service through SQL Azure Labs, called Trust Services. It is an application-level encryption framework that can be used to protect sensitive data stored on the Windows Azure Platform. By using Trust Services you can store keys, authorizations and encryption policies in the cloud, and use them to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data. Trust Services provides a API that simplifies the development process and enables easy integration with data driven applications. Check it out at
SQL Server Team Blog - Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:46
Our friends in the Microsoft BI Team are kicking off a new contest today centered on Power View, and you will have the opportunity to participate and win prizes. Power View is the new interactive data exploration and visualization tool on SQL Server 2012. Starting today and continuing every Tuesday and Thursday until March 6, 2012, the BI Team will be asking a series of questions related to some interactive Power View demos that were released recently. Contest questions will be sent out via the @MicrosoftBI Twitter handle. The first person to send a reply to @MicrosoftBI with the correct answer and #MSPV hashtag will win a prize pack valued at $50.00 USD!
SSIS Team Blog - Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:05
The EzAPI project has been updated for the SQL Server 2012 release. You can find the updated source code here. Changes Task and Component IDs updated for SQL 2012 For 2005/2008 support, please use a previous version of the code Project upgraded to .NET 4 EzProject – SSIS 2012 Project object model support Project Connection Manager support EzScript – Script Task support EzSrcDestMultiStreamPackage – new package template EzLookup – new TreatDuplicateKeysAsError property EzFileSystemTask – fixed multiple properties EzActiveXScript – Removed as it is no lon
SQL Server Team Blog - Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:47
The history of SQL Server dates back to 1989 when the product came about as a result of a partnership between Microsoft, Sybase, and Ashton-Tate. SQL Server has evolved tremendously over the years and now Microsoft is getting ready to bring SQL Server 2012 to market, beginning with the SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event happening on March 7, 2012 at 8am PST. Be sure to register today at www.sqlserverlaunch.com to learn about the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 at your own pace, on your own schedule. This event brings together a who’s who of industry experts and executives to tell the SQL Server 2012 story in this unique online launch event.
SQL Server Team Blog - Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:40
I am Ravi Ramachandran from the SQL Server Appliance Engineering team and would like to show how to measure the IO capabilities of the HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance which is optimized for SQL Server. The Engineering teams from HP and Microsoft collaborated closely for many years to design the DBC Appliance from the ground-up. Many database implementations and cu
Microsoft SQL Server Support Blog - Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:34
By Gregory Suarez | Sr. Escalation Engineer | SQL Server I was recently working with one of our customers when he indicated it would be great if the Microsoft Linux ODBC driver could be used to access his other database systems - in addition to Microsoft SQL Server. Apparently, he like
SQL Server Team Blog - Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:00
Our first online live accelerated training program for SQL Server MCM was such a hit that we’re bringing it back starting March 6. Whether you’re preparing for SQL Server 2008 MCM exams, or just looking to take your SQL Server skills to the next level, don’t miss out on this unique training opportunity. Starting March 6: Accelerate your path to SQL Server MCM This series of live online sessions with a SQL MCM presenter offers a low-cost and convenient solution for MCM exam preparation, or for those looking for advanced training around MCM topic areas. In seven weeks, with two weekly sessions of two hours each, the focus each week will be on one of the exam topic areas
SQL Server Team Blog - Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:00
Several years ago, I worked for a company where I felt my potential wasn’t being tapped into. I didn’t feel challenged and quite frankly, I felt underemployed. My husband had mentioned to me that he knew about a company, by the name of Pragmatic Works, that gave away a free week of I.T. training to people who were interested in getting into a new career of Business Intelligence. To be honest, I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but it had already sounded better than what I was currently doing. You had to meet certain criteria to even apply: military veterans, unemployed or underemployed. After submitting the required information, I was accepted into the Foundation. Now, I figured it would be incredibly challenging considering that extent of my experience with computers consisted of checking email and using company software. It took me 1 hour to drive to this little office out in Green Cove Springs. When
SQL Server Team Blog - Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:30
The SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event kicks off on March 7, 2012 starting at 8:00AM Pacific (-8:00 GMT) with keynotes from Microsoft Executives including: Ted Kummert, Corporate Vice President, Business Platform Division and Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President, Database Systems Group. Following the keynotes, you’ll have access to over 30+ sessions to learn about the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 at your own pace, on your own schedule. The following sessions below are recommended for all DBAs and IT Professionals that want to learn all about the exciting New World of Data with SQL Server 2012. During the first 24 hours of the virtual launch event, you’ll be able to live chat with members of the SQL Server team to help answer your questions. Register today at
SQL Server Team Blog - Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:06
You are a SQL Server DBA, and I know what you are going through. You are frustrated at having to correct other people's work. You are tired from being woken at odd hours, or needed to work on weekends. And the better you get at your job, the more likely you cannot advance in your ca
SQL Server Security - Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:00
Last week, we released SQL Azure Security Services through SQL Azure Labs. In this initial version of our labs, you can Scan your SQL Azure server or individual databases for security issues - We look for design issues, elevation issues and etc. Get a report of your database security model - You can quickly know which users exist in a database, role memberships, permissions on various objects and etc, to reason over presence of user accounts or permissions on various objects. Scan your data for malware presence (Currently we only check for Mass SQL Injection Attacks) - We have been observing Automated Mass SQL Injection attacks for over 4 years now, we scan for presence
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:40
As part of the SQL Server 2012 release several changes were made to Analysis Services that should alleviate some issues previously seen on large NUMA node machines. Separation of IO and Processing Jobs To better understand how the changes that were made work, it is helpful to have some background information about what types of issues were seen in earlier releases. During testing, it was found that a 2 NUMA node 24 core server was handling roughly 100 queries per second during stress testing. The same tests were then run on a 4 NUMA node server with 32 cores and the queries answered per second actually decreased. Investigation indicated the cause as cross NUMA node access to the system file cache. For example if the first job that read a file was scheduled on a CPU assigned to NUMA node 1 and a subsequent job, which needed to read the same pages from the file, was
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:33
I was sitting through SQL Server 2012 training, and Ajay Jagannathan was showing us Management Studio. Eric Burgess had worked on this topic. He started covering some neat things, that have apparently been there for a while, but I just never played around with it enough to see what all you could do. I’m sure a lot of others are not aware of these either, so I thought I would highlight some of them. These may help to make you more productive, or not - depending on how long you spend playing with these. The biggest change for Management Studio within SQL Server 2012 is that we are using the Visual Studio 2010 Shell. These items aren’t exactly new, but they were new to me. 1. Keyboard shortcuts There are a ton of Keyboard shortcuts that you can use within Visual Studio. The default settings are based on Visual Studio 2010. Here is a list of those shortcuts.
SQL Server Team Blog - Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:07
SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v5.2 is now available. SSMA simplifies database migration process from Oracle/Sybase/MySQL and Microsoft Access to SQL Server and SQL Azure. SSMA automates all aspects of migration including migration assessment analysis, schema and SQL statement conversion, data migration as well as migration testing to reduce cost and reduce risk of your database migration project. The new version of SSMA - SSMA 5.2 provides the following major enhancements: Support conversion of Oracle %ROWTYPE parameters with NULL default Support conversion of Sybase’s Rollback Trigger Better user credential security to support Microsoft Access Linked Tables Reduce Cost and Ri
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:46
As you may or may not know, SSRS 2008 R2 added the ability to automatically create page breaks on group changes. Historically, people attempted to use custom code to accomplish this and, while it worked, the pagination logic we use in SSRS 2008 R2 breaks the standard implementation of this for several reasons. You can see the typical implementation of this at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chrishays/archive/2006/01/05/resetpagenumberongroup.aspx. Unfortunately, in SSRS 2008 R2 the pagination engine does multiple passes in some scenarios thus breaking this logic. Also, the logic referenced above makes the assumption that the report is rendered from page 1 to page N and this assumption is not necessarily true either. We recognized that losing that a
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:49
If you have followed this blog, you have probably seen a series of posts documenting the life of a project I’ve been working on, Atlanta, to a product called System Center Advisor. Today marks the official release of that product. This has been a particularly rewarding journey for me to see an idea about giving our knowledge in CSS to customers turn into a full proactive assessment service powe
Microsoft SQL Server Support Blog - Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:36
By Gregory Suarez | Sr. Escalation Engineer | SQL Server The CTP release of the Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28160 ) opens many opportunities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 5.x) customers who want to access the power of Microsoft SQL Server. Well known utilities such as BCP (bulk copy) and SQLCMD are provided with the driver and their use is fairly straight forward; however; some customers have mentioned the absence of an SDK and C/C++ samples. These features are slated to be available shortly after the product RTM's at the end of March 2012 but in the meantime, you can use the existing MSDN ODBC C/C++ samples to
SQL Server Team Blog - Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:56
On March 7, 2012 we are hosting the SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event (VLE), to share the latest on SQL Server 2012 and the evolution of the Microsoft data platform. Through our VLE, anyone, anywhere in the world can simply log in and be a part of this amazing experience – consuming content at your own pace while still experiencing all the benefits of a tradeshow event. What are some great reasons to check out our VLE experience? You want to learn from SQL Server insiders Learn more about the new features of SQL Server 2012 through access to more than 30 sessions. Our experts will demonstrate how your business can go further, forward, faster by capitalizing on mission critica
SQL Server Team Blog - Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:54
We talk a lot about the features and technical “how to” behind SQL Server, but our favorite topic is showing real-world examples of how it helps our customers achieve their goals and save millions of dollars. One great example of this is The Co-operative Group and their switch from Oracle to SQL Server. The Co-operative Group operates 5,000 retail stores, and is one of the world’s largest member-owned businesses. The Group’s top strategic priority is expanding its membership base, and they set an aggressive goal to grow to 20 million members
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:47
For some reason I have been looking at DMV output closely the last couple of weeks. I just blogged about the pending I/O requests and now I have a behavior to outline for dm_tran_session_transactions for todays blog. select * from sys.dm_tran_session_transactions The scenario I was looking at is as follows.
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:28
I have been working an issue where the DMV was returning io_pending_ms_ticks incorrectly. The following output is an example of ~164 hour delay. Unlikely to occur without any other side effects noted. select * from sys.dm_io_pending_io_requests
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:00
Suresh brought to my attention that we have been getting questions as to why SQL Server starts on group 1 and then group 2 and it is not predictable? Then Tejas brought up another issues and since I worked on this way back before we released SQL 2008 R2 I went back to my notes to pull up some details that I thought might be helpful. The answer is that you need a SQL Server that is Group Aware to use more than one group worth of CPUs in Windows. However, if you have an older version or a SKU that does not support enough CPUs to span groups the default is for Windows to start the service on any group. SQL Server 2008 R2 uses the group aware so it will use new APIs and establish proper use of the
SQL Server Storage Engine - Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:45
In my previous blogs, I had described how Readable Secondary functionality works SQL Server 2012. As you look at other database vendors, you will realize that they also provide the functionality to offload read workload to secondary or mirror. However, if you look closer, you will realize each vendor has significant differences on how this functionality is made available to customers. Here is one comparison that I have done between SQL Server and DB2. Competitive study of Readable Secondary in DB2 9.7 DB2 9.7 HADR configuration supports ‘active’ standby server that can be used for query workload. From competition perspective, it is similar to Readable Secondary functionality. This report is based on DB2 9.7documentation. For details, please refer to the link
SQL Server Team Blog - Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:14
In my last post in November on Mission Critical customer implementations of SQL Server, I mentioned that we would include some details on customers already using SQL Server 2012. Over the last few weeks, we have released some of these first stories highlighting customers that are already realizing the benefits of using new features such as AlwaysOn, Power View and Data Quality Services. This is an opportunity to bring some of those first stories into one place so you can get an overview of these stories. Below you will find a short description of the case studies with links to more detailed accounts of the stories. Mediterranean Shipping Company “SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn gives us an integrated high-availability and disaster recovery solution that delivers around-the-clock data
SSIS Team Blog - Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:15
Quick post – just wanted to mention the full day SSIS Design Patterns talks I’ll be doing at SQL Saturday #105 and SQL Bits X. Details are available here: SQL Saturday #105 Pre-Con SQL Bits X – Training Day For a sample of the Performance Design Patterns I’ll be covering, see my presentation from TechEd North America 2010 on Channel 9.
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:27
Dear Customers, The Microsoft SQL Server Sustained Engineering team is proud to announce the release of SQL Server 2008 SP3 Cumulative Update 3. Cumulative Update 3 contains a roll-up of hotfixes released since the initial release of SQL Server 2008...(read more)
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:26
Dear Customers, Keep your system up to date with the most recent cumulative update package for SQL Server 2008 SP2. This package contains all of the SQL Server 2008 hotfixes that have been released since the initial release of SQL Server 2008 SP2....(read more)
SSIS Team Blog - Sat, 14 Jan 2012 01:44
In SQL Server 2012, you can now debug the Script component by setting breakpoints and running the package in SQL Server Data Tools (replaces BIDS) . When the package execution enters the Script component, the VSTA IDE reopens and displays your code in r
SSIS Team Blog - Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:11
As you may already know, the SQL Native Client OLE DB provider is being deprecated. This doesn't affect other OLE DB providers or the OLE DB API. Also, the SSIS OLE DB components are not being deprecated. In SQL Server 2012 SSIS, you can continue to use OLE DB connections and will need to for components such as the Lookup transformation and the Slowly Changing Dimension transformation that require OLE DB. In the post-Denali release, you’ll be able to upgrade and continue to operate these packages without needing to do additional work to explicitly remove OLE DB from the packages.
SQL Server Team Blog - Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:26
One of our lab project teams was pretty busy while the rest of us were taking a break between Christmas and New Year’s here in Redmond. On January 3rd, their new lab went live: Microsoft Codename "SQL Azure Compatibility Assessment". This lab is an experimental cloud service targeted at database developers and admins who are considering migrating existing SQL Server databases into SQL Azure databases and want to know how easy or hard this process is going to be. SQL Azure, as you may already know, is a highly available and scalable cloud database service delivered
SQL Server Team Blog - Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:21
For the past couple of weeks we’ve been asking you to submit stories about how the #SQLFamily gives back to you. In exchange for each submission we’ve received, we’ll be donating $50 to the Pragmatic Works Foundation to provide SQL training to veterans, the jobless and the underemployed. Tomorrow is your last chance to submit! Our goal is to reach 400 submissions, which would be a $20,000 donation, but we still need your help to make it. You can submit your story in one of three ways: Email your story to
SQL Server Team Blog - Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:14
There are only a two days left until the New Year, which means your last chance to submit a #SQLFamily story and contribute to the Pragmatic Works Foundation drive is fast approaching. All submissions are due by December 31st, 2011 at 11:59pm PST, and there is still an opportunity to help us reach our goal of $20,000 in donations. We are so touched by the stories and the generosity of the #SQLFamily. Keep the stories coming! Whether it’s passing a friend on an escalator, or making a big move, the #SQLFamily comes together to spread joy during the holiday season and beyond. Check out some of this week’s contributions:
SQL Server Team Blog - Fri, 23 Dec 2011 06:03
The holidays are here and the “#SQLFamily Gives Back” Campaign is continuing to pick up steam. The SQL Server community has raised $1,300, which will allow for 26 people to receive SQL training! Thank you to everyone who submitted this week! There is still plenty of time to submit your story. Doing so by December 31st, 2011 will help us reach our goal of donating $20,000 to the Pragmatic Works Foundation. That means we could have 400 new members to the #SQLFamily! These stories are a reminder of the strength of this community and a chance for us to harness this community spirit towards a great cause.
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:23
When you connect to Secondary Replica, but it has not been enabled for read workload, you will get the following error under two situations (1) You connect directly to one of the databases under availability group. It is denied because the database is not enabld for read workload. (2) You connect to a non-AG database such as master database which succeeds and now you execute ‘use <db>’ command. Msg 976, Level 14, State 1, Line 1 The target databa
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:00
In the previous blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2011/12/22/alwayson-challenges-with-statistics-on-readonly-database-database-snapshot-and-secondary-replica.aspx we described that stale or missing statistics will potentially lead to a sub-optimal query plan and how it can impact the query performance on on read-only database, database snapshot and readable secondary. This blog describes how we have solved this in SQL 12 for all three flavors of databases transparently without any user intervention.
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:32
I am sure you all have dealt with situations when the statistics on one or more columns is either missing or not up-to date. When user submits a query for execution, the SQL Server goes through logical (simplifying or restructuring a query) and physical optimization that considers various query plans based on statistical information and then picks the one that has the least estimated cost. The key to physical optimization is the accurate estimation of data distribution (i.e. statistical information) of the input tables and intermediate results (e.g. output of JOIN operator). When optimizing a query, the optimizer generates, the statistical information on one or more tables/indexes, if not available and auto-stats has not been explicitly disabled by the user. It uses statistics generate the optimized query plan. It is not recommended to generate a query plan without the statistics because you may end up with a sub-optimal plan
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:07
In my previous blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2011/12/22/alwayson-minimizing-blocking-of-redo-thread-when-running-reporting-workload-on-secondary-replica.aspx, I described how Readable Secondary eliminates potential REDO thread blocking for DML work running on the primary replica by mapping all isolation levels used in the reporting workloads to Snapshot Isolation. While it was essential that we eliminate REDO thread blocking with concurrent DML on secondary replica, it comes at some overheads as described in this blog. First thing to understand is that if you do not e
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:32
In earlier blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2011/12/22/alwayson-impact-on-the-primary-workload-when-you-run-reporting-workload-on-the-secondary-replica.aspx, I discussed the impact on RTO in case the REDO thread gets blocked. While designing this feature, it was one of the key usability constraints we had (i.e. to eliminate REDO blocking for common usage scenario). For the un-initiated, here is the problem Primary Replica
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:23
The primary goal of AlwaysOn technology is to provide High Availability for Tier-1 workloads. The ability to leverage secondary replica(s) to offload reporting workloads and database/transaction log backups is useful, but only if it does not compromise High Availability. This is one of the very common concern/question that I have heard from many of you. In this context, let us evaluate the impact of Active Secondary on the primary replica and workload and what you can do to minimize its impact. Transaction response time: When a transaction is run on
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:58
One question that I often get asked is if there will any data latency if you are using 'Sync' replica for read workload. The short answer is yes. Here is the blog that explains it in detail. While the reporting workload running on the secondary replica gets to access the data as it is changing on the primary but there is some data latency, typically of the order of seconds. If your reporting or read work load cannot tolerate data latency then there is no choice but to run it on the primary replica. Most customers whom I interacted with indicated that their reporting workload can indeed tolerate data latency of the order of minutes. This is good news because as offloading reporting workload to secondary replica allows customers to leverage their investment in High Availability configuration and deliver better performance to
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:26
In the previous blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2011/12/22/AlwaysOn-setting-up-readable-seconary-replica.aspx I mentioned that there are two options to configure secondary replica for running read workload. The first option ‘Read-intent-only’ is used to provide a directive to AlwaysOn secondary replica to accept connections that have the property ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly set. The word ‘intent’ is important here as there is no application check made to
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:16
The easiest way to create an availability group and adding replicas is to use the availability group wizard. You can invoke the wizard by right-clicking on 'Availability Groups'. The picture of the explorer window below shows that I have created 1 availability group 'StockPro' with two replicas 'SUNILA03-6PLHSI' (primary) and 'SUNILA03-YLZO1U' (secondary). The availability group StockPro contains one database 'hadr_test' but you can have more databases if you want. For now, let us work with this simple example
SQL Server Storage Engine - Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:34
This series of blogs is targeting AlwaysON Readable Secondary. Please refer to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlalwayson/archive/tags/availability+group/for other blogs in the related area Readable Secondary is part of AlwaysOn suite of functionality available in SQL12 release. It allows customers to leverage their investment in High Availability hardware for offloading read workload such as reporting to one or more secondary replicas. Offloading reporting workload to secondary replica frees up resources on the primary node for primary application workload to achieve higher throughput and at the same time allowing resources on secondary replica to reporting workload to deliver higher performance. So it is a win-win situation both for primary and reporting workload.
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:00
Earlier this year I travelled to Japan having the opportunity to visit some of our customers and prospective customers. One feedback I received loud and clear was poor performance when using DBCC CHECKDB as customers have moved into the TB range of databases on a regular basis. I had certainly heard this feedback before from other CSS engineers but not the extent of complaints I heard while in Japan. I had never really investigated these claims of performance issues because I suppose I fell under the same feelings I had and seen for years of “CHECKDB takes as long as it takes”. On that trip I met Cameron Gardiner from the SQL Customer Advisory Team (SQL CAT). Cameron is an expert with SAP systems and focuses his efforts at Microsoft on SAP running on SQL Server. Cameron spent tine to expla
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:21
Dear Customers, The Microsoft SQL Server Sustained Engineering team is proud to announce the release of SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Cumulative Update 4. Cumulative Update 4 contains a roll-up of hotfixes released since the initial release of SQL Server...(read more)
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:19
Dear Customers, The Microsoft SQL Server Sustained Engineering team is proud to announce the release of SQL Server 2008 R2 Cumulative Update 11. Cumulative Update 11 contains a roll-up of hotfixes released since the initial release of SQL Server 2008...(read more)
SQL Server Team Blog - Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:31
A few months back we announced SQL Server 2012 availability on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Since that time we are seeing more momentum worldwide as other service provider partners are going live with SQL Server 2012 for their customers in their cloud leveraging the latest SQL Server 2012 RC0 release. A few examples we are seeing from have recently launched, in talking to these partners SQL Server 2012 is generating a lot of excitement with their customers. Discount ASP.NET a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the US has announc
SQL Server Team Blog - Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:31
Wow #SQLFamily…just wow. The SQL Server Team has been overwhelmed by the amazing outpouring of support from the #SQLFamily. In just a few days, the community is off to a great start in sending us submissions that have raised money for the Pragmatic Works Foundation, a non-profit that provides free technical training to veterans, the jobless, and underemployed. We will donate $50 to the Foundation for each of the first 400 submissions we receive from the SQL Server community. We are off to a good start and we encourage those of you who haven’t submitted your stories so that we can reach our
SSIS Team Blog - Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:33
The SSIS team is now hiring developers! Would you like to be a key part of a successful team that is rapidly increasing its impact on the multi-billion dollar Data Integration market? Are you enthusiastic about data integration, transformation, performance and scalability? If so, come join the SQL Server Integration Services team. We are a growing team that is passionate about building and delivering the most comprehensive and easiest-to-use ETL platform in the industry. We have an expanding customer base that has ever-increasing demands for more capabilities. Having shipped our first in-the-box release with MS SQL Server 2005, we are continuing to extend our product reach, evolve the feature set, and deliver new customer-focused innovations. As of 2011, we’re the most popular data integration tool on the market. We are actively working on the next set of investments to help customers deal with the challenges of big, unstructured data, and the hete
Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team - Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:27
We are proud to announce that the community technology preview (CTP) of ApacheTM HadoopTM-based Services for Windows Azure (or Hadoop on Azure) is now available. As noted in on the SQL Server Data Platform Insider blog, the CTP is by invite only http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2011/12/14/availability-of-community-technology-preview-ctp-of-hadoop-based-service-on-windows-azure.aspx While Hadoop is important to our customers for performance, scalability, and extreme volumes - as noted in our blog What’s so BIG about “Big Data”? – it is a slight paradigm shift for our us in t
SQL Server Team Blog - Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:05
In October at the PASS Summit 2011, Microsoft announced expanded investments in “Big Data”, including a new Apache Hadoop™ based distribution for Windows Server and service for Windows Azure. In doing so, we extended Microsoft’s leadership in BI and Data Warehousing, enabling our customers to glean and manage insights for any data, any size, anywhere. We delivered on our promise this past Monday, when we announced the release of the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of our Hadoop based service for Windows Azure. Today this preview
SSIS Team Blog - Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:43
Now that the MSDN blog platform supports having multiple authors (ok, it’s supported it for years, but I only just figured out how to do it…), we’re going to start seeing a lot more posts from other members of the SSIS team. I will continue writing about SSIS, but will (mostly) be posting to my new blog at http://www.mattmasson.com (RSS feed). Thank you!
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:22
There was a question on Twitter about how to display a report in HTML instead of MHTML due to some browser issues. Based on the fact that it was MHTML, I’m assuming we are talking about exporting a report as the default report view is HTML. First off, if we look at our export options for a report, we see the following: HTML isn’t an option.
SQL Server Team Blog - Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:48
Back in November, the SQL Server team witnessed an outpouring of support for the #SQLFamily meme started by Thomas LaRock (aka @SQLRockstar) and Karen Lopez (@datachick). For an installment of SQL Rockstar’s “Meme Monday,” they asked the SQL community to share the meaning behind #SQLFamily. The responses were heartwarming and painted a picture of a passionate community who help and support each other both professionally and personally, as well as share a laugh and pint (or two) when they get together.
Microsoft SQL Server Support Blog - Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:51
The other day I was working with a customer who was in the process of developing SSIS "Control Flow" custom component. He was having an issue in compiling/building his code in Visual Studio and getting Warning about the build process about indirect dependency on the .NET Framework assembly due to SSIS references. Error: The primary reference "Microsoft.SQLServer.ManagedDTS, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91, processorArchitecture=MSIL" could not be resolved because it has an indirect dependency on the .NET Framework assembly "mscorlib, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" which has a higher version "2.0.3600.0" than the version "2.0.0.0" in the current target framework. The cause and resolution of this error as it is explained by our escalation engineer Jason at:
SQL Server Team Blog - Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:41
We are pleased to announce the release of the Microsoft Codename “Data Transfer” Lab. Microsoft Codename "Data Transfer" is an easy-to-use Web application to import your data into SQL Azure or Blob storage. Whether you’re: Preparing data for cloud analytics Uploading files to power your Azure service or Web application Propagating your data to SQL Azure for publication through Windows Azure Marketplace Simply testing the Azure platform Importing
SQL Server Team Blog - Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:20
What’s inside the new HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance? On Sept 13th, we launched the new HP Database Consolidation Appliance which supports deploying 1000’s of workloads in a private cloud infrastructure. The solution is specifically designed for I/O intensive workloads and can load balance a complex mix of workload
SSIS Team Blog - Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:10
A new whitepaper on upgrading SSIS to SQL Server 2012 is now available. Summary: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services (SSIS) provides significant improvements in both the developer and administration experience. This article provides tips that can help to make the upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services successful. The tips address editing package configurations and specifically connection strings, converting configurations to parameters, converting packages to the project deployment model, updating Execute Package tasks to use project references and parameterizing the PackageName property.
SQL Server Team Blog - Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:57
We are pleased to announce that SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB Release Candidate 0 is now available for download. Try it here today! LocalDB is a new version of Express created specifically for developers. It is very easy to install and requires no management, yet it offers the same T-SQL language, programming surface and client-side providers as the regular SQL Server Express. LocalDB was created so that developers that use SQL Server no longer have to install and manage a full instance of SQL Server Express on their laptops or other machines. Plus, developers can take this into production as it also serves as an embedded database. Click here for more
Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team - Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:15
Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Shaun Tinline-Jones, Silvano Coriani, Steve Howard, Thomas Kejser, Sanjay Mishra A computed column is computed from an expression that can use other columns in the same table. The expression can be a noncomputed column name, constant, function, and any combination of these connected by one or more operators, but the expression cannot be a subquery. A simple example of a computed column is: Col1 Col2 Computed_Col=(Col1+Col2) 100 100 200 A benefit of using computed columns is that they can save developers from having to write calculation logic at the application layer; at
SQL Server Team Blog - Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:00
In our continued commitment to interoperability, we are very excited to announce the availability of a preview release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux! This release will allow native developers to access Microsoft SQL Server from Linux operating systems. To assist our customers with native applications on multi-platform we have ported our existing, reliable and enterprise-class ODBC for Windows driver (a.k.a. SQL Server Native Client, or SNAC) to the Linux platform. Download the driver today here! In this release, the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux will be a 64-bit driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. We will support SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 with this release of the driver. Notable driver features (in
Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team - Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:21
Author: Thomas Kejser Contributors/Reviewers: Alexei Khalyako, Jerome Halmans, Fabricio Voznika, Sedat Yogurtcuoglu, Mike Ruthruff, Tobias Ternstrom and Steve Howard In this blog, I will explore ideas for extending SQL Server with new, fast hash functions. As will be shown, the high speed, built in functions CHECKSUM and BINARY_CHECKSUM are not always optimal hash functions, when you require the function to spread data evenly over an integer space. I will show that it can be useful to extend SQL Server with a new CLR User Defined Function (UDF). In distributed workloads, hashing a columns in the data and evenly distributing the hash value into buckets, is often a good way to evenly scale work over multiple scale units (either machines or NUMA nodes). In such an architecture, each scale-unit will be responsible for handling a subset of the total buckets. Achieving a good distribution in hash buckets will depend on the skew of
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Tue, 22 Nov 2011 06:21
Dear Customers, The Microsoft SQL Server Sustained Engineering team is proud to announce the release of SQL Server 2008 SP3 Cumulative Update 2. Cumulative Update 2 contains a roll-up of hotfixes released since the initial release of SQL Server 2008...(read more)
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Tue, 22 Nov 2011 06:19
SSIS Team Blog - Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:25
There have been a couple of improvements made to the Raw File Source and Destination in RC0. The Raw file format now contains Sort information The Destination saves all sort info (including the Comparison Flags for string columns) The Source reads and honors the sort info The Raw File Destination UI now has a “Generate initial raw file” button which allows you to create an empty raw file containing rows (allowing you to retrieve the metadata with a Raw File Source without having to run the package) Let’s take a look at this new functionality. My package is retrieving data from DimProduct, and sorting on the ProductKey field.
SSIS Team Blog - Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:24
A new tool for SSIS 2008 and 2008 R2 is now available for editing package configuration files. The Package Configuration File Editor identifies configuration paths that are not valid and enables you to correct the paths without having to open the package in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDs). Package configuration paths can become invalid when packages are moved from development environments to production environments. The Package Configuration File Editor was created by Debarchan Sarkar. The tool is available for download from CodePlex, at http://ssisconfigeditor.codeplex.com/.
SSIS Team Blog - Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:49
One of the post-CTP3 changes for SSIS in SQL Server 2012 is the addition of a user interface for the Pivot transform. This post walks through the new UI, which can be found in the new RC0 preview release. Sample Data For this example, we’ll be pulling data from the AdventureWorks sample database. We’ll be grabbing the total sales of all products in the Accessories category (ProductCategoryID = 4), grouped by year.
SSIS Team Blog - Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:34
This post is from Parth Shah, a Software Development Engineer in Test on the SSIS Team. Previously we have talked about SSIS Catalog Managed Object Model. For those of you don’t remember what MOM is or have not heard of it before, think about MOM as a set of APIs that allow you to automate configuring, deploying, validating and executing your projects and packages in a seamless way. We showed an example of how to achieve this through C# but did you know you can achieve the same result through Windows PowerShell? This post focuses on the usage of the SSIS Catalog Managed Object Model through Windows PowerShell. Over the course of this blog entry, we will go over a couple scenarios, so you can see how to achieve different tasks using PowerShell. For each scenario, we will go over a goal of what we are trying to achieve and then a
SSIS Team Blog - Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:57
At the 2011 PASS Summit I presented a Top 10 list of features that had been added since CTP3, or hadn’t gotten much attention so far. Now that the SQL Server Release Candidate 0 (RC0) available, I can start blogging about them! I’ll continue to post more details over the next couple of weeks. Top 10 Features You Didn’t Already Know About (from PASS) #1 – Change Data Capture We’ve partnered with Attunity to provide some great CDC functionality out of the box. This includes a CDC Control Task, a CDC Source compo
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:41
I recently had a lengthy exchange on DReplay with Jonathan Kehayias (SQL MVP). From this exchange I filed several work items with the SQL Server development team to help install and setup DReplay easier in the future. Jonathan has started a series of blog posts on his experiences that I would only be copying to place on this blog. I suggest you read his series to assist you with your DReplay activities as well. http://sqlskills.com/blogs/jonathan/post/Installing-and-Configuring-SQL-Server-2012-Distributed-Replay.aspx Bob Dorr - P
Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team - Tue, 15 Nov 2011 05:54
As announced during the PASS Summit 2011 Day One Keynote, we are diving deeper into the world of Big Data by embracing and contributing to the open source community and Hadoop. We’ve had a lot of good coverage on this topic with some examples below. Microsoft Expands Data Platform With SQL Server 2012, New Investments for Managing Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:59
The increased number of cores per socket is driving NUMA designs and in SQL Server support we are seeing more NUMA machines and less pure SMP machines. For whatever reason over the past 2 weeks I have fielded a bunch of questions around NUMA and the information is good for everyone to know so I will try to share it here. There are various levels of NUMA configurations that can make the this entire discussion complicated. I will try to point some of these things out here as well. How is the Operating System Presenting NUMA Configuration To SQL Server? Start with the Windows Task Manager | Process Tab. Select a process, Right Mouse | Set Affinity -- the following dialog is presented showing you the Processor Groups
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:16
Keith and I continue to field the question as to why the Post-Load Data Cleanup appears to take a long time (hours) and can cause SQL Server to use large amounts of CPU. Notes from Keith: "What that step does it try to correlate stmt-level events with the batch in which they ran, and show plans with the statement. If you capture starting events then all of this can be done at import time (not via the query) because ReadTrace caches the previous batch/rpc starting event and previous sp:stmt starting event and uses those sequence numbers to fill in on the values on the completed events/showplan events during the import itself. I’ve tried to optimize this pos
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:05
Recently I encountered error 1803 when working on SQL Server 2012. The script I ran against a SQL Server 2012 instance was CREATE DATABASE [suspect_db] ON PRIMARY ( NAME
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:00
Dear Customers, SQL Server 2008 SP3, available on the Microsoft Download Center since October 6th is now available through Microsoft Update. The primary packages for SQL Server 2008 SP3 will update systems with Standard, Workgroup, Developer and Enterprise...(read more)
SQL Server Storage Engine - Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:06
For those who have been around databases for any length of time, the idea of putting a database that you care about from either a reliability or performance perspective on an (SMB – Server Message Block) file share seems like a crazy idea, but recent developments have made SMB-based file shares a very viable platform for production SQL Server databases with some very interesting advantages. Historically, the perspective has been: File shares are slow. The connections to the share may be unreliable. The storage behind the file share may be flaky. SMB consumes large amounts of CPU if you can get it running fast enough. Over the past few years, all of these conditions have changed, and in particular the work which has been done on the 2.2 revision to the SMB protocol has produced some stunning results. So let’s look at these one by one: File Shares are slow
Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team - Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:06
Author: Shaun Tinline-Jones Reviewers: Mike Ruthruff, Sanjay Mishra, Alexei Khalyako Not too long ago an ISV that developed solutions using SQL Server as the RDBMS, asked me how they could query a database as at a point in time. This was a relatively easy answer, thanks to the Database Snapshot feature. I was however surprised at the next question “Can we update the database snapshot?” A reactive response is “No. You cannot update a Database Snapshot” Msg 3906, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:40
Dear Customers, Keep your system up to date with the most recent cumulative update package for SQL Server 2008 SP3. SQL Server 2008 SP3 Cumulative Update 1 contains fixes released in SQL Server 2008 SP2 CU 5 & 6. For customers upgrading to Service...(read more)
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:35
Dear Customers, The Microsoft SQL Server Sustained Engineering team is proud to announce the release of SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Cumulative Update 3. Cumulative Update 3 contains a roll-up of hotfixes released since the initial release of SQL Server...(read more)
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:30
Dear Customers, The Microsoft SQL Server Sustained Engineering team is proud to announce the release of SQL Server 2008 R2 Cumulative Update 10. Cumulative Update 10 contains a roll-up of hotfixes released since the initial release of SQL Server 2008...(read more)
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:51
This is to recap my week at PASS Summit 2011. This was my 4th US PASS, and every year it is amazing. I really enjoy sharing information with the community as well as getting to meet the people I talk to on Twitter and in other areas. Between Technical and Social Networking, this really is a great event. There were a lot of people at PASS this year as well. This was the first year that I’ve noticed an
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Sun, 16 Oct 2011 19:03
I have been supporting Microsoft’s JDBC driver for almost six years now and the one thing with which I always struggle is getting logging going. JDBC logging is probably some of the most useful logging out there (I only wish BID tracing were so easy to enable and consume!), but for some reason I always struggle getting the correct logging.properties file registered and then figuring out exactly where the log file will be generated. I finally got tired of fighting with it and decided to change both my test code and my command-line to make this much, much easier. The first thing to recognize is that Java will by default generate the log file in the User.Home folder. Therefore, I decided to output that location as part of my code: System.out.println("User Home Path: " + System.getProperty("user.home"));
SQL Protocols - Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:50
Greetings Developer community: We heard yesterday and today at the PASS conference about the exciting new areas that we are investing in bringing the power of SQL Server to our customers. Many of our developers who rely on native connectivity to SQL Server primarily use ODBC for their connectivity needs. We have been supporting ODBC as a part of the SQL Native Access Client (SNAC)
SQL Server Security - Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:46
PASS Summit 2011 is coming to Seattle this week starting October 11th 2011. You'll have the opportunity to meet a lot of folks from the SQL Server team during the event, and a variety of speakers that will share their experiences and delight you with awesome SQL Server sessions. Lastly, the SQL Server Engine Security Team will be present at the conference and this is your opportunity to meet with us so that we can answer your questions. For those interested in SQL Server Security, we recommend that you attend the following talks – (1) SQL PASS Session - [DBA-412-M] What’s New in Security for SQL Server Code Name "Denali" Friday, October 14, 2011 2:00 PM-3:15 PM, Room 608 Presented by Il-Sung Lee (2) SQL PASS Theater Session - SQL Server 2011 Audit Enhancements Wednesday,
Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team - Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:05
The SQLPASS 2011 summit is upon us again and all of our flocking to our fair city Seattle for our yearly technical-and-karoke fest! If you are up for some technical deep dives, here is the list PASS sessions presented by SQLCAT! And don’t forget to check out the Birds of Feather event – the tech talk luncheon.
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:30
Microsoft SQL Server Sustained Engineering group is pleased to announce the release of SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 3 (SP3). Both the Service Pack and Feature Pack updates are available for download on the Microsoft Download Center. As part of our continued...(read more)
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:43
If you are still using ADO in some of your code and tried to upgrade your build machine to Windows 7 SP1, you probably ran into the fact that you cannot run the recompiled program on downlevel OSes unless you modify your references to point to the backward compatible type libraries from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2517589. Unfortunately, the solution does not work in several scenarios of which the biggest is Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The GUID change itself was not really the big problem – in fact, if you have been developing against MDAC/WDAC for a while you probably remember the days when applications would only run on the MDAC version that it was compiled on or higher. When we stopped revisioning MDAC around the Windows 2003 SP2 days, the problem pretty much went away. Until recently… What happened is that we realized that some of our ADO APIs used
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:19
In SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 we made updates to dynamically accommodate disk drives that present physical sector sizes greater than 512 bytes. In practice, these are generally 4K, physical sector size drives and the SQL 2008 R2 transaction log code will dynamically adjust to the presented physical sector size to accommodate various sector configurations. To understand this issue completely you have to go back to SQL Server 2000 where we shipped SQL Server's master, model and msdb as if it had been formatted on a 4K, physical sector size drive. This allowed SQL Server to execute on a 4K drive without having to rebuild the master, model or msdb databases.
Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team - Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:55
Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Thomas Kejser, Curt Peterson, James Podgorski, Christian Martinez, Mike Ruthruff Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) was introduced in Windows 2003 to improve Windows scalability to handle heavy network traffic, which is typically the case for SQL Server OLTP workload. For more details about RSS improvement on Windows 2008, please check out the whitepaper - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463253.aspx and the blog - http://sqlcat.com/sqlcat/b/msdnmirror/archive/2008/09/18/scaling-heavy-network-traffic-with-windows.aspx. I was recently working with a partner to test a high scale SQL load against a DL980 server with 8 sockets, 80 physical cores runni
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:01
The following questions have surfaced several times recently so I decided to post the answers to assist others. String is missing proper closing quote near (Char Pos: 0xC1 Byte Pos: 0x182) This is not a utility bug. It is a command found in the trace that was malformed. For example: select * from tbl where name = ''Bob' <---- This is missing the the trailing quote and the parser log
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Tue, 20 Sep 2011 02:54
In my last post, I reviewed the Microsoft CSS involvement at the upcoming 2011 SQL Server PASS Summit. One big part as I’ve mentioned is the SQL Server Clinic. I thought you might find it interesting to learn more about exactly what the clinic is and how you can make the best use of it. Starting on Wednesday, October 12th 2011 (which is the first day of the main conference), we will open up the doors of room 611 (I’m fairly confident we will use this room again) of the Seattle Convention Center. Our hours are “after keynote” each day (we want anyone working the clinic to have the chance to attend the keynote) until about 5-6pm. At any point in time, we could have up to 10-15 Microsoft SQL CAT and CSS engineers in the room waiting to answer your questions or troubleshoot your problems. There is no reservation required. Just show up and walk in. When talking to our CSS engineers there are
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:49
Microsoft SQL Server Release Services - Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:33
Dear Customers, Keep your system up to date with the most recent cumulative update package for SQL Server 2008 SP1. This package contains all of the SQL Server 2008 hotfixes that have been released since the initial release of SQL Server 2008 SP1....(read more)
SSIS Team Blog - Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:13
The PASS Summit Schedule Builder is live, and I’ve spent the morning looking over all of the great sessions they have lined up. I always find putting together a schedule challenging – it’s hard to balance my time between the sessions that I want to attend, the sessions I should attend for career growth, and spending time in the Dev Pods / Ask the Experts and the SSIS booth in the Microsoft Pavilion. I usually end up triple booked for the entire week. SSIS Sessions I’ll be presenting two sessions – A Day of SSIS in the Enterprise is a pre-con session on Monday, and a breakout session on Thursday -
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Sun, 11 Sep 2011 22:55
For the 9th year, the Microsoft CSS team will speak and meet customers at the SQL PASS Summit, being held this year in Seattle, Washington from October 11th through the 14th. As in past summits, CSS will have a presence during pre-conference seminars, the main conference, and our infamous SQL Clinic. I’ll be posting more details on our involvement as we progress closer to the conference, but for now let me give you a quick summary of what CSS will bring to the conference. Pre-Conference Seminar Adam Saxton has become of the of the best speakers from CSS to come to recent PASS Summits. We are sending him back again this year to spend a day covering the all important, but misunderstood topic of Kerberos. Kerberos is something that anyone who must deploy SQL Server wishes they didn’t have to worry about. But unfortunately, it impacts everyone and is not a simple subject. Preventing and troubleshooting Kerberos issues
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:19
In SQL Server 2008 some of the memory based DMVs show memory node id 0 when you might not expect them to. For example you could see the following on a single, node system. SQL 2008 memory_clerk_address type name memory_node_id 0x0000000003EF6828 MEMORYCLERK_SQLBUFFERPOOL Default 0 0x0000000005040828 MEMORYCLERK_SQLBUFFERPOOL Default 0 SQL 2008 R2 memory_clerk_address type
CSS SQL Server Engineers - Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:20
Applies To: SQL 2008, 2008 R2 and Denail builds The SQL Server developer can elect to partition memory allocations at different levels based on the what the memory is used for. The developer may choose a global, CPU, Node, or even worker partitioning scheme. Several of the allocation activities within SQL Server use the CMemPartitioned allocator. This partitions the memory by CPU or NUMA node to increase concurrency and performance. You can picture CMemPartitioned like a standard heap (it is not a HeapCreate) but this concept is the same. When you create a heap you can specify if you want synchronized assess, default size and o
Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team - Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:09
Author: Shaun Tinline-Jones Technical Reviewers: Thomas Kejser, Steve Howard, Jaime Alva Bravo, Kun Cheng, Jimmy May Note: Validation for this post was performed in the SQL CAT Customer Lab on an HP Proliant DL580 G7, Intel Xeon Nehalem E7-4870 2.40 GHz 4 socket, 10 physical cores, 20 logical cores for a total of 40 physical cores, 80 logical cores; 1TB RAM. SQL Server 2008 R2 was installed on a Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 1.28TB MCL using driver version 2.3.1 We recently engaged a Tier 1 Global ISV in our labs, where the objective was to achieve the highest Business Transactions for their application. During the testing and optimizing we encountered an interesting behavior where