Visual Studio can be used to debug processes remotely, using the MSVSMON agent. This can be used for both native code and managed code. However, for successfully debugging managed code applications, symbol files have to be correctly loaded – and...

In this walkthrough I will take you through one aspect of FCI + AG configuration: forced failover. We will simulate failure and force failover. And in the process we will have some … Data Loss . Does that not sound horrible! Relax! You should not...

Today I was teaching a debugging class to our customers. As a foundational element we normally review the virtual-to-physical address translation mechanism, at least to a basic level. In this class we decided to go a bit deeper and show the evidence  ...

Recently a colleague asked me if SQL collations have any impact on performance. We also hit upon another question: do local variables (DECLARE @somevar <datatype>) have a collation associated with them and if so how is it controlled? Let us take...

A FAQ we get is whether it is supported to have the ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB (catalog databases used in SSRS) on an older version of SQL Server (as compared to the version used on SSRS.) Here is the summary answer along with the reference links...

Today we were discussing the AlwaysOn connectivity options, and the various combinations therein of Readable Secondary setting and the connection strings became very complex. So I have summarized all the possible outcomes in the pivot tables below. ...

Today in some discussions with my colleagues we were looking at the AlwaysOn Listener which allows SQL Server client applications to be abstracted from the details of the AlwaysOn Availability Group implementation. On the surface, The Listener essentially...

While Books Online clearly mentions the steps to Configure a Server to Listen on a Specific TCP Port we still see people missing out on one small but important detail in these steps: they forget to delete the entry (0 or some random port) for dynamic...

A colleague of mine recently asked the question ‘I see CPU N is constantly pegged at 100%; is there any good way to determine which specific process is using that specific CPU?’ Well, he already figured that Task Manager or Process Explorer does not provide...

Today while poking around the AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature I came across the above error when testing the read-only access routing configuration. That configuration allows connections with declared ReadOnly intent to be routed to one of the read...