The DL785 has been in constant demand since it arrived in September, 2008 - mostly doing SQL work of course. The 8-socket form factor for an x64 system is still not widely known about among the customers that come to the lab. The fact remains that most...

Thanks to the joint marketing efforts of HP and AMD we just unpacked and racked a new HP DL785 G5 in the data center. It is hard to miss at 7U’s but there is an awful lot of power packed into this machine. The standard configurations have 4 sockets populated...

At the MTC’s we’ve worked with a few customers interested in discussing how they could migrate existing cubes from Essbase to SQL Server Analysis Services. In one particular instance we did a proof of concept that involved manually converting one of the...

Last year we worked with a customer on a proof of concept that involved populating and running some performance tests against a 20TB database. The POC was conducted using the following software and hardware: Windows Server 2003 Datacenter sp1 ...

On March 5th, we announced the Microsoft SQL Server Data Service offering at the mix conference...here's some basic information on the topic. Q: What is Microsoft SQL Server Data Services? A: Microsoft® SQL Server™ Data Service (SSDS) is a highly...

Wondering how to implement "sparkline" type reports with Reporting Services, well take a look at this post from an MTC architect in New York. http://blogs.msdn.com/jbasilico/archive/2008/01/09/implementation-of-sparkline-type-reports-within-reporting...

Read about the experiences of an MTC architect out in New York who's tested Teradata v12 against SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services. http://blogs.msdn.com/jbasilico/archive/2008/02/26/functionality-testing-of-teradata-v12-with-sql-server-2005-analysis...