And I’ve created and produced the first video on the SQL Server track. It is called SQL Server Connectivity Deep Dive and is currently available from this link for Premier customers subscribed to this new offering.

  The short answer is: Those returned by master.dbo.xp_enum_oledb_providers. But let’s dig deeper and try to give you the detailed description you deserve. The triggering reason why I’m writing about this is because a colleague described the following...

Last week I was involved in a discussion about the default transaction isolation level used by the transaction objects in WCF’s services (Serializable) versus the one used by the transaction objects in Entity Framework for SQL Server (ReadCommitted) whose...

Today, a colleague exposed the following case:   In the execution plan I do see some exclamatory marks on Sort, Hash Joins operators but there is no warning information available. I am using SQL Server 2012.  How do I interpret the exclamatory...

I invested some time today investigating what SQL Server does with the initialization of TEMPDB’s log file, because a question was raised last week during Robert Davis session on TEMPDB at SQL PASS Summit in Seattle, and I wasn’t sure about what the answer...

3988 - New transaction is not allowed because there are other threads running in the session. 3930 - The current transaction cannot be committed and cannot support operations that write to the log file. Roll back the transaction.   If so, I would...

Or the chicken and egg problem when attempting to restore a corrupted model database as it was presented by my MCM colleague Gail Shaw the other day in our MCM discussion group. This is the case he presented us with: Hi all Something I’ve been puzzling...

I just happened to find that when the log manager raises error 9002 “The transaction log for database '%s' is full. To find out why space in the log cannot be reused, see the log_reuse_wait_desc column in sys.databases” the State can vary...

Following is the answer I provided to the interesting question asked by my colleague Pat Martin about the insides of crash recovery in SQL Server.   The iterator used to scan the catalog for the databases that need startup and recovery returns them...

For those of you who may not be familiarized with this object, sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats is one of the many Dynamic Management Views built into SQL Server. This one specifically falls into the category index related DMVs , and it returns counts of different...

Last week I went to a customer who showed me the following weird information.   He opened SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) 2008 R2 and connected to one particular instance of SQL Server 2008 R2 in which he observed this behavior we wasn’t able...

I’ve found myself answering these questions more than three times only during the the last week. All those questions coming from very different people with different profiles. Some being our customers, some being partners, and even from some coworkers...

A PFE colleague from Italy, recently exposed the following situation in an internal distribution list: From: <removed_to_protect_identities> Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 8:36 AM To: <removed_to_protect_identities> Subject: Report hanging...

A PFE colleague from the UK approached me yesterday with the following concern: Hi Nacho, I may need to find out the call stacks when a spinlock backoff occurs at a customer tomorrow. So I found this script from a SQLCAT article: http://sqlcat.com/sqlcat...

This is a question I was asked recently whose answer I had to look in the code because it wasn’t documented anywhere. So, I’ll use this mean to propagate that piece of knowledge. The value is a constant, hard coded in the product, and its value is five...

This is the story of someone who claimed to be a member of the sysadmin fixed server role and, when he tried to run one stored procedure through a session in which any of the different settings that instruct the relational engine that the user is interested...

When a domain user is in multiple Windows groups, and these group logins have a different default databases (and different language) on the same instance, and there is no login for the Windows user account, how does SQL Server decide which database (and...

This one wait type is one of the many hundreds which came up new with SQL Server 2008. As my colleague Denzil Ribeiro found in the code, this one in particular is one that accounts the time SQL Server threads have waited for file system operations to...

Even though current and past versions of the documentation have never explicitly said so, for obvious reasons the password is no returned . In fact there is no public SSRS API that can return passwords in stored credentials. Just to let you know until...

Inside MSDB, there exists a system table named dbo.subsystems which is populated the first time SQL Server Agent services runs. Every time SQL Server Agent starts up, among the several things it does, it interrogates the contents of that table to find...

A PFE colleague presented the following scenario and asked for the justification of what seemed to be, a priori, something inexplicable. The story was like this: When I check the memory allocation using memory nodes and memory clerks DMVs the total amount...

Most of the functionality implemented in the web service that requires getting the value of any system property doesn’t read it directly from the ReportServer Catalog. Instead, it uses a set of members from the Microsoft.ReportingServices.Library.Global...

If your instance of Reporting Services is not installed in SharePoint integrated mode and you see the following error reported in your SSRS log files, don’t panic. It is expected: library!ReportServer_0-14!be8!06/22/2012-08:36:58:: e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft...

A colleague asked the following a few days ago: <MESSAGE> With the following rows I’m trying to revoke “connect” permissions from database user. Unfortunately I always get the output from the red line (see script below) Output: I ‘d like to suppress...

For whatever reason whose understanding has been lost over time it has been the case since SQL Server 2000, at the very least, that when a client attempted to log in into an instance of SQL Server using any data access library other than OLEDB, and neither...