Aggregated Posts (sorted by date)
Application Lifecycle Management Overview for Windows Azure
Abstract from Carpe Datum (Indexed 2012-02-07):
Developing in Windows Azure is at once not that much different from what youre familiar with in on-premises systems, and different in significant ways. Because of these differences, developers often ask about the specific process to develop and deploy a Windows Azure application - more formally called an Application Lifecycle Management, or ALM. There are specific resources you can use to learn more about various parts of ALM - Ive referenced those at the end of this post. But ALM has multiple...(truncated)...
SQL Azure Migration Wizard: Fantastic tool for moving data between SQL Azure Federations and SQL Server and scale out single SQL Azure DBs
Abstract from TSQLNet Weblog - Cihangir Biyikoglu (Indexed 2012-02-03):
If you worked with federations, I am sure you are already know about the online tools like SQL Azure Management portal that give you the ability to orchestrate your federations with repartitioning operations or resize member MAXSIZE and edition. In episode #69 on Cloud Cover, George and Wade cover moving schema and data between SQL Server, SQL Azure databases with Federations! So you can move SQL Server databases to SQL Azure Federation, or single scale-up SQL Azure databases to SQL Azure Fede...(truncated)...
Analysis Services Thread Pool Changes in SQL Server 2012
Abstract from PSS SQL Server Engineers (Indexed 2012-01-31):
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 JobsTo 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 ...(truncated)...
Management Studio tricks you may or may not know about
Abstract from PSS SQL Server Engineers (Indexed 2012-01-31):
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. Im 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 ...(truncated)...
PHP and Federations in SQL Azure - Sample Code from Brian
Abstract from TSQLNet Weblog - Cihangir Biyikoglu (Indexed 2012-01-30):
Brian has a tone of samples on PHP and Federations in this post right here... Another great one! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/silverlining/archive/2012/01/18/usin...(truncated)... -cihan[Image]
The case of the incorrect page numbers
Abstract from PSS SQL Server Engineers (Indexed 2012-01-29):
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/resetpa...(truncated)... Unfortunately, in SSRS 2008 R2 the pagination e...(truncated)...
Show all index and heap access operators in the plan cache
Abstract from Service Broker Conversations (Indexed 2012-01-27):
with xmlnamespaces (default 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2004/07/showplan') select x.value(N'@NodeId',N'int') as NodeId , x.value(N'@PhysicalOp', N'sysname') as PhysicalOp , x.value(N'@LogicalOp', N'sysname') as LogicalOp , ox.value(N'@Database',N'sysname') as [Database] , ox.value(N'@Schema',N'sysname') as [Schema] , ox.value(N'@Table',N'sysname') as [Table] , ox.value(N'@Index',N'sysname') as [Index] , ox.value(N'@IndexKind',N'sysname') as [IndexKind] , x.value(N'@EstimateRows', N'f...(truncated)...
The official release of System Center Advisor
Abstract from PSS SQL Server Engineers (Indexed 2012-01-27):
If you have followed this blog, you have probably seen a series of posts documenting the life of a project Ive 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 powered by System Center and the cloud. In my past blog posts, Ive shown you examples of the knowledge this...(truncated)...
How much overcapacity are you running with today? I bet SQL Azure Federations can trim that!
Abstract from TSQLNet Weblog - Cihangir Biyikoglu (Indexed 2012-01-26):
I know I already posted a whole bunch on “why use federations” or “what are federation for” but most conversations on federations, I get the question on ‘why’? so I wanted to go back to basics and what the combination of SQL Azure (a.k.a PaaS database in the cloud) and Federations is a killer combination.Obviously federations can be used in many different ways; multi-tenancy for scaling to spikes and bursts or for gradually growing workloads. It is great for g...(truncated)...
Use Existing MSDN C++ ODBC Samples for Microsoft Linux ODBC Driver
Abstract from Microsoft SQL Server Support Blog (Indexed 2012-01-26):
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 men...(truncated)...
Team Foundation Server (TFS) in the Cloud - My Experience So Far
Abstract from Carpe Datum (Indexed 2012-01-24):
I recently joined a software development project that involves not only myself and other internal Microsoft employees, but a partner and a customer as well. We are building a hybrid solution that uses assets on premises as well as Windows Azure for processing. When we put the team together we picked a methodology (Agile) for the project (we use multiple methodologies at Microsoft - whatever the project needs) and then we started talking about Source Control. Were all comfortable with various t...(truncated)...
How It Works: sys.dm_tran_session_transactions
Abstract from PSS SQL Server Engineers (Indexed 2012-01-24):
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. Server A Server B Broker calls activation procedure ...(truncated)...
XEvents in SQL Server 2012: No more "lazy XML" in event harvesting scripts
Abstract from Bob Beauchemins Blog (Indexed 2012-01-23):
I've said before how thrilled I am will the new extended event UI in SSMS for SQL Server 2012. However, you might be one of the early adopters who made up their own scripts to define extended event sessions, and use hardcoded scripts to harvest the results. So, you may run into this problem if you're using what I call "lazy XML" in the event harvesting script. Take, as an example, an extended event session defined as follows with 3 actions:create event session errorsession on serveradd e...(truncated)...
How It Works: sys.dm_io_pending_io_requests
Abstract from PSS SQL Server Engineers (Indexed 2012-01-23):
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[Image] In the process of this investigation I uncovered several details that I found helpful to share. Full Text and File Streams There is a...(truncated)...
Assigning SQL Server, SQL Agent to a Processor Group (OOM, Hang, Performance Counters Always Zero for Buffer Pool, )
Abstract from PSS SQL Server Engineers (Indexed 2012-01-23):
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 ...(truncated)...
AlwaysOn: Comapring Readble Secondary with the similar functionality available in DB2
Abstract from SQL Server Storage Engine (Indexed 2012-01-22):
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 realiize 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 9.7DB2 9.7 HADR configuration supports ‘active’ standby server that can be used for...(truncated)...
AlwaysOn: Comparing Readable Secondary with the similar functionality available in DB2
Abstract from SQL Server Storage Engine (Indexed 2012-01-22):
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 DB...(truncated)...
Fan-out Querying for Federations in SQL Azure (Part 2): Scalable Fan-out Queries with TOP, ORDER BY, DISTINCT and Other Powerful Aggregates, MapReduce Style!
Abstract from TSQLNet Weblog - Cihangir Biyikoglu (Indexed 2012-01-19):
Welcome back. In the previous post: Introduction to Fan-out Querying, we covered the basics and defined the fragments that make up the fan-out query namely the member and summary queries. Fan-out querying refer to querying multiple members. We looked at queries examples in the previous post with member queries with no summary queries, that is the member queries were simply UNIONed. In this post, well take a look at Summary queries. when are they needed? what are some common patterns and example...(truncated)...
What is an LSN: Log Sequence Number
Abstract from Service Broker Conversations (Indexed 2012-01-18):
LSNs, or Log Sequence Numbers, are explained on MSDN at Introduction to Log Sequence Numbers: Every record in the SQL Server transaction log is uniquely identified by a log sequence number (LSN). LSNs are ordered such that if LSN2 is greater than LSN1, the change described by the log record referred to by LSN2 occurred [...]
SQL Server 2012 FileTable and T-SQL on AlwaysOn secondary replicas
Abstract from Bob Beauchemins Blog (Indexed 2012-01-17):
OK, back to PathName() with AlwaysOn, which I started on in the previous blog post. PathName() in SQL Server 2012 doesn't return the computer name by default ("AlwaysOn1" or "AlwaysOn2" in my example) but returns the VNN name (virtual network name). That is, it returns the availability group "listener share" name. In my case, the PathName() would start with AlwaysOnAG1. There's an additional option in SQL Server 2012 PathName(), that allows you to return the current replica name. So, whe...(truncated)...