The other day I was using a 3rd party utility which was built on the .NET platform. My primary work computer happens to be a x64 installation. So on this computer when I fired the utility up, and tried to perform some tasks it would error with a .NET...

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...

Scenario A common requirement for enquiry queries on an OLTP database is to have search criteria which are very specific ('get me details for for OrderID = NNNN') and also the occasional reports which ask for all the orders ('get me all the orders...

Here's a quick checklist before you install an instance of SQL Server on a failover cluster; or any service pack or hotfix for an instance. Following this list should eliminate 90% of the most common causes of setup failure. Please note that this checklist...

Some of us are unaware of the relevance of proper symbols files. The symbol file is a deliverable just like the binary. Though it is not required for running the application, it is very important to debug issues which arise in production. What are...

I was debugging some issues with the help of Application Verifier and WinDbg. Since I was onsite I did not have any access to Microsoft’s private symbol servers, so I was using the public symbol server ( http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols ). On...

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. ...

  Background A customer asked me a question last week: in CLR-COM interop case, who is responsible to free up a string returned from COM? My understanding was that the interop layer setup by .NET will automatically take care of this. However, I thought...

I just delivered a session on ‘T-SQL Horrors: how NOT to code’ at TechEd India. The response has been great, and those of you who see this after attending my session, thank you very much for your interest and participation! What I appreciate the most...

Something which I have been waiting for a long time has finally been released! The ReportViewer 2012 redistributable RTM package is available for download now! Deployment notes FYI, ReportViewer is used by Management Studio (SSMS), other utilities and...

Background Constraints in SQL Server are of the following types: CHECK constraints DEFAULT constraints Foreign key constraints NULLable constraint UNIQUE constraint PRIMARY KEY constraint BTW, if you are wondering what a NULLable constraint is, it is...

Background It is a very common requirement in SSIS packages to extract contents of a compressed ZIP file, and then process that file in a data flow. From what I can see, it appears that TaskUnzip is quite a popular way to achieve this. So as part of the...

This one is a quickie for an easy reference to most commonly used debugging tools and links. I hope you find it useful, and kindly indicate your feedback on this page by using the comments section or by rating the post! Debugging Toolbox Tool Key Usage...

Very often we get asked a question about 'how many processors does my SQL Server 200x Edition really support'. This post hopes to summarize the considerations and actual limits. SQL Licensing is per socket First, let's take a look at the Books Online...

Now that SQL Server 2008 SP1 is released (download link here ), it is time to test a very interesting capability: Service Pack slipstreaming. That means that you can save some time by doing an 'integrated' installation of SQL 2008 which includes the SP1...

This one is even more common and therefore has a high impact: the usage of the above functions in WHERE clause predicates. I've examined each in some detail below. Here's a typical example I see, based off the AdventureWorks database. Scenario To illustrate...

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...

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...

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...

Today in the lab I was working on a test 3-node cluster. I was using Hyper-V for this. We normally use the iSCSI Software Target for testing, so I had set that up on a central VM and then published the target to all the VMs. The disks were seen in...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...