Today during a discussion a point came up around the role of PRINT statements in production code. While most data access today is routed through a data access layer (typically .NET or JDBC) and is focussed on consuming result sets (or executing U/I/D...

Let’s say for some reason your users want to implement MDX DRILLTHROUGH statement (equivalent to the cube action provided by most OLAP browsers) in SSRS. Here’s a step-by-step way to implement this. For the purposes of this walkthrough...

Many a time I am asked how to get a head start with debugging .NET issues – hangs / crashes and most commonly, memory issues. So I assembled this list of resources which helps you get started. In addition, if you are a Premier Support subscriber, you...

My colleague reported that during testing forced failover for a SQL database engine instance, it just ‘failed’ and refused to fail over to the other node in a 2-node cluster. The failure in this case was initiated by shutting down the local...

Recently I had to use MDX Studio for some MDX query tuning. 2 quick tips: Latest download link for MDX Studio can be obtained from the support forum at http://ssas-info.com/forum/3-mdx-studio/ The earlier versions of MDX Studio are referenced from Mosha...

I found these links today in response to a customer question around 'real world' benchmarks for financial applications running on SQL Server. These benchmarks describe the TEMENOS T24 Core Banking system, which is probably as 'real world' as it gets....

I’ve recently started learning about SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) appliance. In the course of learning, I came across some links and resources in connection with this appliance, which I will share in this blog post. I will keep it updated...

  My colleague and friend, boB Taylor (the spelling is not a typo – please visit http://www.opsvault.com/meet-our-contributors and see why) has recently released a GUI tool which allows you to configure the XML files required for SQLDiag to capture...

A long time ago, I had blogged about the perils of ‘wildcard’ query patterns. As a response to one of the comments in that post, I learnt about a new optimization introduced in SQL 2008 wherein the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint would help in these kind of cases...

Recently we were struggling with trying to figure out how to suppress the address bar for a popup window opened using JavaScript’s window.open method. Normally, there is an option there which allows you to specify ‘location=no’ and the address bar is...

My team, Premier Field Engineering (India) recently created a group on LinkedIn ( http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3761475&trk=hb_side_g ) which we will use to share our experiences, upcoming offerings, career opportunities and more. Membership...

  Here are some essential things to consider when trying to tune a DB mirroring setup. They revolve round the following concepts: The effect of Virtual Log Files (VLFs) on recovery and therefore failover times The interplay (or lack thereof) between...

In case you are not aware, there have been some significant licensing changes in the SQL 2008 R2 release, especially with the introduction of the DataCenter edition as the top-of-line edition. SQL Books Online documents the facts, as always, but sometimes...

Recently, I was informed about some very useful resources (some free webcasts and information about SQL performance tuning related training) at www.sqlworkshops.com That initiative is headed by Ramesh Meyyappan, a former Microsoft employee who worked...

I recently faced a situation where the free space on my laptop disk was suddenly depleted. After some searching, I found that PowerGUI keeps its scripteditor logs at “C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Quest Software\PowerGUI\Logs”. If you use PowerGUI...

Till some time ago, I used to direct my customers to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb671432.aspx for obtaining scripts which use the DMVs in SQL 2005/2008 to retrieve very commonly used performance troubleshooting related information. Those...

While Activity Monitor in SQL 2008 does a good job depicting waiting tasks, top N queries etc.; many DBAs are simply too familiar with the erstwhile SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports. While officially Microsoft does not support the usage of...

I recently acquired a new Windows Mobile phone and was using the Windows Mobile Device Center to set up the partnership with my laptop. In the process, I came to a stage where I had to activate IRM as per the steps in Activate Information Rights Management...

Recently there has been a change to the way you obtain downloads of the WinDbg family of Debugging Tools for Windows. The classic link for the direct download of these installers was http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx. Unfortunately...

I recently had to determine at runtime the version of the assembly containing a particular type. After some searching I hit upon this: System.Reflection.Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(MyNamespace.MyType)).GetName().Version.ToString() Do note that this will...

I was doing some testing the other day with a ReportViewer control hosted in a WinForms application to do local mode report processing. As some of my reports had a drillthrough / navigation option set, I had setup a set of DrillthroughEventHandler to...

Problem I recently hit upon an issue with trying to setup a linked server to an instance which was already a subscriber to a publication. When replication is setup, it actually creates a remote server for the subscriber. However that ‘remote server’ is...

At our workshops and during other customer interactions, we are usually asked for links to good blogs and reading materials. Here is a list of my favorite SQL-related blogs, arranged in no specific order. http://blogs.msdn.com/craigfr : Craig Freedman...

Before I proceed, I will add two disclaimers: This script is provided as-is for knowledge purposes. It is not a recommendation, or in any way intended for production usage. No warranty or guarantee is made about the correctness of the script. Use it at...

Some times, we see customer has (accidentally or otherwise) enabled the option ‘boost priority’ for SQL Server worker threads. In general Microsoft does not recommend that you set this option. Why? First a bit of background. When we set the ‘priority...