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...

Today I was using SCONFIG (if you don’t know what SCONFIG is, check out these posts to add a Windows 2008 R2 core server to an existing domain. I had set the IP address and ensured that the domain name and credentials are correct, but I kept getting ...

I was facing this on a VM setup, where the service account of my SQL Server service is a domain account. The DC is also a VM. Here were the symptoms: While backing up the database to the UNC share, I was getting an error: "Operating system error...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

This is a ‘quick-and-not-so-dirty’ version of a T-SQL formatter / ‘pretty printer’ in PowerShell. To use this, please install the SQL 2012 SP1 version of the SQLDOM from the Feature Pack page . (If you already have SQL 2012 client tools on your machine...

This one is a quick tip. I recently upgraded to Office 2013 RTM and wanted to use the excellent Power View feature which is now an integral part of Excel! However, after I setup my tables (actually I used the Power Pivot data model) I was consistently...

Firstly - Happy New Year, everyone! In my job as a Principal Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft Services, I am a regional lead for a proactive risk identification program called the SQLRAP. For over 7 years now we have evolved this from a manually conducted...

In SQL 2000, the kpid column in sysprocesses was a convenient way to find out the actual worker thread ID (OS level thread identifier) for a given task. How does one do this using the DMVs? Here is a quick way: select R.Session_Id, Th.os_thread_id from...

Kids in school today are more comfortable working with computers than with pen-and-paper. And for kids with special needs it may actually be the only way for them to express themselves. So I always wondered what we can do to make the learning experience...

Some of you might be aware of the above namespace , which holds an implementation of a first-class T-SQL parser. In this post I would like to explain some of the complexity you will face when dealing with the ScriptDOM yourselves, typically using Visitor...

TechEd 2013 was a grand success! Thank you – those of you who stayed till 6:15PM at the Pune session – and even more to those who engaged me in Q&A till 7PM that evening I was very impressed and happy to see people interested in my talk, even though...

Today there was a question on the #sqlhelp Twitter hashtag: “Is it possible to get UPDATE/SELECT/INSERT/DELETE statement counts from SQL Server?” Implementation This is a perfect use case for the SQLDOM parser a.k.a. Microsoft.SqlServer.TransactSql.ScriptDom...

Scenario Today my customer told me that he is facing an error message ‘Cannot resolve the collation conflict’ when executing an JOIN between two tables: a base table and a temporary table. They had recently created the database afresh from scripts and...

Some customers have adopted block level replication of the storage disks (LUNs) as their DR solution for SQL Server databases. Remote mirroring of storage disks sounds great – transparent to the application, replicates every block as-is; so very little...

One of the things I do in my day job at Microsoft Services is to review database design and T-SQL code. Now, when it comes to code, there is a challenge just to find ALL the possible code which hits our database engine. This is because a non-trivial amount...

Over the last year I’ve been fortunate enough to be trained by some top-notch professionals from the world of media and big-stage events on how to deliver world-class sessions – whether it be a multi-day training, a short TechEd session, an online meeting...

Requirement Some time back I presented a PowerShell script which extracts T-SQL code from RDL files. Remember that I created this script to assist me in doing code reviews of ad-hoc SQL snippets which were embedded in the report definition files. Another...