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...

Earlier this year I travelled to Japan having the opportunity to visit some of our customers and prospective customers. One feedback I received loud and clear was poor performance when using DBCC CHECKDB as customers have moved into the TB range of databases...

There was a question on Twitter about how to display a report in HTML instead of MHTML due to some browser issues.  Based on the fact that it was MHTML, I’m assuming we are talking about exporting a report as the default report view is HTML. ...

I recently had a lengthy exchange on DReplay with Jonathan Kehayias (SQL MVP).   From this exchange I filed several work items with the SQL Server development team to help install and setup DReplay easier in the future. Jonathan has started...

The increased number of cores per socket is driving NUMA designs and in SQL Server support we are seeing more NUMA machines and less pure SMP machines.    For whatever reason over the past 2 weeks I have fielded a bunch of questions around...

Keith and I continue to field the question as to why the Post-Load Data Cleanup appears to take a long time (hours) and can cause SQL Server to use large amounts of CPU. Notes from Keith: "What that step does it try to correlate stmt-level events...

Recently I encountered error 1803 when working on SQL Server 2012. The script I ran against a SQL Server 2012 instance was CREATE DATABASE [suspect_db] ON   PRIMARY ( NAME = N'suspect_db' , FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11...

This is to recap my week at PASS Summit 2011. This was my 4th US PASS, and every year it is amazing. I really enjoy sharing information with the community as well as getting to meet the people I talk to on Twitter and in other areas. Between Technical...

I have been supporting Microsoft’s JDBC driver for almost six years now and the one thing with which I always struggle is getting logging going.  JDBC logging is probably some of the most useful logging out there (I only wish BID tracing were so...

If you are still using ADO in some of your code and tried to upgrade your build machine to Windows 7 SP1, you probably ran into the fact that you cannot run the recompiled program on downlevel OSes unless you modify your references to point to the backward...

In SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 we made updates to dynamically accommodate disk drives that present physical sector sizes greater than 512 bytes.   In practice, these are generally 4K, physical sector size drives and the SQL 2008 R2 transaction log...

  The following questions have surfaced several times recently so I decided to post the answers to assist others.   String is missing proper closing quote near (Char Pos: 0xC1 Byte Pos: 0x182) This is not a utility bug.   It is a command...

In my last post, I reviewed the Microsoft CSS involvement at the upcoming 2011 SQL Server PASS Summit . One big part as I’ve mentioned is the SQL Server Clinic. I thought you might find it interesting to learn more about exactly what the clinic is and...

For the 9th year, the Microsoft CSS team will speak and meet customers at the SQL PASS Summit, being held  this year in Seattle, Washington from October 11th through the 14th. As in past summits, CSS will have a presence during pre-conference seminars...

In SQL Server 2008 some of the memory based DMVs show memory node id 0 when you might not expect them to.   For example you could see the following on a single, node system. SQL 2008 memory_clerk_address  type                     ...

Applies To:   SQL 2008, 2008 R2 and Denail builds The SQL Server developer can elect to partition memory allocations at different levels based on the what the memory is used for.   The developer may choose a global, CPU, Node, or even worker...

While working recently with a  customer, it was brought to my attention that while SQL Server has a great feature to compress backups (introduced in SQL Server 2008), the space consumed by the backup before it is complete may not be as expected. ...

Lately we got a customer who called in and reported  that a particular statement involving a temp table always got recompiled and caused performance problems.   We have a KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/243586   which documents...

I have been asked how to automate SQLIOSim on several occasions.  SQLIOSim is a utility to test SQL Server I/O integrity ( not performance ) patterns against a system without needing to install SQL Server on the system.  It ships with SQL Server...