FlushCache is the SQL Server routine that performs the checkpoint operation.  The following message is output to the SQL Server error log when trace flag ( 3504 ) is enabled. 2012-05-30 02:01:56.31 spid14s     FlushCache: cleaned...

I am on several e-mail aliases related to Always On databases (reference Availability Group, AG, HADRON) and the question of worker thread usage is a hot topic this week.  I developed some training around this during the beta so I decided to pull...

Getting back into the swing of things, I thought I would post my thoughts about how SQL Rally 2012 went along with sharing some of the experiences.  I had posted before about what our presence would be like at Rally.  You can read that here...

I’m happy to announce that the SQL Support group will be present at SQL Rally 2012 which will be held in Dallas, TX.  It helps that we have one of our major support centers in the area.  Our team will be speaking at the conference and we will...

Consider the following scenario on a X64 system:      You install SQL Server [2008 R2, 2008, 2005] standard edition.      You grant the "Lock Pages in Memory" user right to the SQL Server service startup...

I’ve been working with Power View reports and one of the items I was setting up was using a BISM Data source connecting to an Analysis Services Instance in Tabular Mode.  When I went to spin up a new Power View Report against the BISM Connection...

Summary The SQL Server 2012 ODBC Driver (SQLNCLI11.dll) updated handling of SQL_WCHAR* (NCHAR/NVARCHAR/NVARCHAR(MAX)) and SQL_CHAR* (CHAR/VARCHAR/NARCHAR(MAX)) conversions. The change was made to accommodate surrogate pair behavior as outlined at: http...

When one of our Managers opened up the PowerPoint slide deck that Power View generated, he got the following error: Some controls on this presentation can't be activated. They might not be registered on this computer. I had found some references to the...

I was working on a Power View report for our internal business numbers and we are making use of the Export to PowerPoint feature to include them in our slide deck.  If you aren’t familiar with this feature in Power View, when you are in the report...

As I wrote my recent blog posts and did more research I found that is would be helpful to highlight the HealthCheckTimeout behavior in more detail. Always On FCI (Failover Cluster Instance) vs Non-FCI Installations Documentation The first thing that I...

Bob Ward, Keith Elmore and I establish goals for every release of SQL Server.   A primary goal is always to make supporting the SQL Server easier.  Not just in the sense of Microsoft support, although it does play a factor, but more so...

I had a great question from my post on sp_server_diagnostics ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2012/03/08/sql-server-2012-true-black-box-recorder.aspx ).  As ' luck ' would have it, Bob Ward, was working on some training and had a similar...

I have seen several traces and questions relating to the output of the XEvent so I thought I would try to explain them a bit in an effort to reduce confusion. Terms Field == Event Data Action == Action Data - The action data is gathered from the current...

Quite an encompassing title I will agree but the features all work together to build a really nice product.  I had this tucked away during beta and thought it would be helpful to post. SQL Server AlwaysON and "Denali" has undergone a significant...

You should be aware the Windows bug with API = SetFileIoOverlappedRange .   This is used by SQL Server (2008 R2 and SQL 2012) only when Locked Pages has been enabled and is in use by the SQL Server. SQL Server Support has NOT encountered this in...

I was discussing debugging with some folk internally that didn’t really have much exposure to it, but wanted to learn.  I considered the items pretty basic and didn’t really dive into to much, but I had a few comments that the information was good...

This would be a perfect time to post a blog talking about the new SQL Server 2012 features.  However, I am going to leave that activity to the marketing folks ( AlwaysOn, T-SQL Enhancements, … ).   I want to talk about something that might...

Note: Validation for this post was performed in the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team ( SQL CAT ) Customer Lab on an HP Proliant DL385 G7 ( overview | quickspec ), AMD Opteron 6176 SE 2.3GHz dual socket (12 cores per socket) with 128GB RAM using HP StorageWorks...

As part of the SQL Server 2012 release several changes were made to Analysis Services that should alleviate some issues previously seen on large NUMA node machines. Separation of IO and Processing Jobs To better understand how the changes that were...

I was sitting through SQL Server 2012 training, and Ajay Jagannathan was showing us Management Studio.  Eric Burgess had worked on this topic.  He started covering some neat things, that have apparently been there for a while, but I just never...

As you may or may not know, SSRS 2008 R2 added the ability to automatically create page breaks on group changes.  Historically, people attempted to use custom code to accomplish this and, while it worked, the pagination logic we use in SSRS 2008...

If you have followed this blog, you have probably seen a series of posts documenting the life of a project I’ve been working on, Atlanta, to a product called System Center Advisor . Today marks the official release of that product. This has been a particularly...

For some reason I have been looking at DMV output closely the last couple of weeks.    I just blogged about the pending I/O requests and now I have a behavior to outline for dm_tran_session_transactions for todays blog. select * from sys...

I have been working an issue where the DMV was returning io_pending_ms_ticks incorrectly.  The following output is an example of ~164 hour delay. Unlikely to occur without any other side effects noted. select * from sys . dm_io_pending_io_requests...

Suresh brought to my attention that we have been getting questions as to why SQL Server starts on group 1 and then group 2 and it is not predictable?  Then Tejas brought up another issues and since I worked on this way back before we released SQL...