Have you ever noticed one of your SQL Server instances running unusually slowly? Have you had difficulty quickly identifying what areas could be affecting its performance? One of our customer support Escalation Engineers, Keith Elmore, specializes in understanding these types of problems. He has worked with customers all over the world on diagnosing their toughest and most critical performance bottlenecks. Keith has put together a set of Reporting Services reports ......

I’ve seen a few posts in forums and newsgroups requesting Best Practices Analyzer support for SQL Server 2005. Good news… we just started developing a new version that will work with SQL Server 2005! If you aren’t familiar with this type of utility, check...

We are mourning the loss of Ken Henderson who passed away this Sunday evening. We don’t know any details at this time, but we will let the community know as we learn more. It was great being around Ken and feeling his passion and learning from him over...

Users of SQL Server 2005 maintenance plans should be aware of a change in SP2 that affects existing cleanup tasks until updated using SQL Server SP2 tools. ......

It's a new year and, with it, we come bearing gifts! We have a pretty significant update to SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer . It contains many new and updated rules for Analysis Services, a few important rules for the Relational Engine, a couple...

One of my favorite parts of my job as a Program Manager is evangelizing our products. I love teaching people how to be more effective by introducing them to new features or tying many existing features together in an end-to-end scenario. I like to learn about technology and I'd imagine that the majority of my readers are also technology enthusiasts by profession. The problem I have now is that I do not have enough time in the day to learn about everything that could be cool and figure out how it could be useful. I recently watched a video by Brian Knight from JumpStart TV on SQL Server Agent Proxy Accounts. I thought it was a great way to quickly learn about one piece of SQL Server Agent without reading lots of documentation. To reach the broadest audience most effectively, I'm considering putting together short videos like the folks at JumpStart TV to give you an overview of how to use our features. My questions to you are......

Sorry for the delay for part 3. I have not been able to take our existing standard reports and make them work properly in a Reporting Services environment. I'm going to release the files anyway, in case one of you can figure out what is wrong. I'm not...

One of my favorite reports is Disk Usage. It prepares two useful graphs breaking down the MDF and LDF space usage. It also provides information about disk space used by tables, partitions, and indexes. This data can also be exported to Excel so you can perform your own calculations....

I have been getting a lot of questions and hearing a lot of speculation about SP2 and BPA. Let me address some of the most common questions. SP2 When will SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 be available? I see there are a lot of great features in the December CTP of SP2. I can’t upgrade my DB engine, yet. Can I upgrade only the tools on my client workstation? Will this still work with SQL Server 2005 RTM and SP1? When will SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer be available? BPA What are some of the new features in SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer? Will we be able to create our own rules? Who is the target audience for SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer? We used SQL Server 2000 Best Practices Analyzer 1.0 to check our T-SQL code. It is very useful in our development process. Why are you getting rid of it?...

This week we celebrate independence. No, I'm not referring to Independence Day in the United States. I'm announcing the official release of SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer as an independently serviceable tool. What do I mean by independently serviceable? ......

SQL Server 2008 SSMS introduces a new feature, Multiple Server Query Execution, in Query Editor. This feature intends to increase the productivity of running same query against multiple servers at once. Some of useage include: · Configure group of...

Before I go on vacation, I'd like to send a quick thank you to the community for giving us their thoughts on the November CTP of SP2. There were many thousands of downloads and a lot of people have started posting their suggestions and bug reports on Microsoft Connect. I'd like to call out a few MVPs for their reviews/feedback on the features in my area......

One of the improvement areas we've introduced in Service Pack 2 is the ability to run your own reports inside Management Studio. See below for a draft of the Books Online topics. This is subject to change at any time. Paul A. Mestemaker II Program Manager Microsoft SQL Server Manageability ...

Thank you to everybody who posted comments in newsgroups, forums, and on the first SQL Server™ Best Practices Analyzer blog entry. We have been able to complete a lot of your requests already. We’ve had some great short-term success with SQL BPA 2.0. Thanks to a lot of help from the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer team, in just a couple of weeks we’ve been able to put together a prototype with the following features:...

Did you know that there is a set of pre-made reports in Management Studio that can help database administrators gather information in many common areas? There are reports for CPU, memory, disk, sessions, queries, transactions, and more baked right into Management Studio. You can access these reports in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2005 SP1 by following these steps......

In an earlier Denali CTP, we had introduced a mechanism for customers to delete the un-used/not required server names from the drop down in connection box in SSMS. There has been a big customer ask for helping them remove the redundant server names from...

The much-anticipated SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer is now available on the Microsoft Download Center. Thank you all for your input on this blog. Thank you to the MVPs who have given me early feedback on the utility before it officially went live......

Hello Everybody! Its a pleasure to start blogging on this wonderful sunny morning at Seattle when the morning mist says good bye and the sun is happy to shine right above us. Everyone is smiling as the weather just turned from wet to pleasant. This is...

Surface Area Configuration (SAC) tool will be removed in SQL 2008 release. This tool exposed two major functionalities. Surface Area Configuration for Services and Connections Surface Area Configuration for Features A. In SQL 2008, starting...

After working on SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 for the past 9 months, I am elated to see it be officially released to the web. This service pack will not only address the most common bugs reported from customers, but it also introduces some cool new functionality. I am meeting with Kimberly Tripp today to show her some of the cool scenarios that are now possible with SP2. ......

For all of those who are coming to my blog looking for the latest Maintenance Plan information, please visit: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933508. In short: * We've released a refreshed version of the service pack without the Maintenance Plan bug * We have released a patch that can be applied to users who have installed the initial release of SP2 ......

What is Policy-Based Management? How does it make SQL Server administration easier? What are the main components? What is the technology behind it? Join my webcast presentation (300 level) to learn this feature inside out with tons of demos. Don’t...

I’ve been getting many requests on what is this new Performance Data Collector tool and how does it work. First off, Performance Data Collector is simply a component as one of the tools in Management Studio (SSMS) involved in performance troubleshooting...

All the samples in this document are based on the DAC module that you can download from the attached zip folder ( DACModule.zip) .To import the modules, Step 1) check your Module Path PS > dir Env:PSModulePath Step 2) chose any of the module...

By Bill Ramos, Program Manager, SQL Server Manageability Team In part 3 of the report series , I showed how to get CPU data from the MDW and display it as a thumbnail chart in the Server Activity History report. In part 4, I’ll show how to extract...