CSS SQL Server Engineers

We are always looking at customer issue reports in order to improve our software and your experience.   The SQL Server Setup development team has identified numerous Watson reports of failed setups due to the compression state of the DATA directory...

Symptoms you encounter: SQL Server 2000 SP4 x86 is installed on a Windows 2003 X64 server. You use x64 backup applications to perform backups of databases. These backup applications use sqlvdi to interact with the SQL Server. You installed the sqlvdi...

I was posed the question today, how do I migrate my SQL Server 2000 DTS packages to a SQL 2005 Server without upgrading them, thus leaving them as legacy DTS 2000 packages within SQL 2005? In other words, how do I copy or move DTS 2000 packages into...

One of my colleagues, Kamil Sykora, compiled a document that goes through how to troubleshoot leaked SqlConnection objects (from a .NET 2.0 perspective).  It was a fairly large document, so I’m not going to post the whole thing.  I’m...

The question of file stream compression during backup and restore arose last week and makes for a good clarification topic. Shown here is a conceptual layout of a database containing file stream containers.    On the left the folders represent...

We get a lot of calls related to Kerberos configuration, and I'm planning to write more about our experiences and troubleshooting techniques for these types of issues across the box (Engine, AS and RS). With Windows 2000/2003 SetSPN had only a few...

I ran across an interesting issue the other day with subscriptions not firing.  I had never ran across this before, but once I was done it made sense.  It was also a good exercise of walking through how subscriptions work.  This may be...

The SQLIOSim knowledge base article outlines the various configuration files in detail.  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231619 - How to use the SQLIOSim utility to simulate SQL Server activity on a disk subsystem. I still get inquires about what...

There have been a couple of SQL Server 2008 fixes shipped in recent Cumulative Updates, that address issues you may encounter during ReadTrace processing and .RML generation, or OStress replay.  Here are the updates we recommend if you use SQL Server...

Summary ReadTrace processing may unexpectedly fail with the following error: A serious error condition (true == pVariant->FIsUnknownType()) has been encountered.                ...

From: SQL Server Customer Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 5:08 AM   I’m often asked by professionals whether CheckDB is still recommended on SQL2k8.  SQL is calculating a checksum to avoid physical page corruption since 2k5. However in...

SQL Server 2005 introduced a background worker to flush trace event streams.   The trace buffer is flushed when it becomes fully populated but a partially populated trace buffer remains in-memory until events fill the buffer or the background...

From: Customer Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 2:04 PM I have seen sometimes a user connection classified as Internal when I run the following query:   USE master ; SELECT sess . session_id , cast ( sess . login_name as varchar ( 40 )) login_name...

In the last post in this series, we looked at how we can determine that our Connection pool was exhausted. In this post I'm going to go a little deeper into the Internal connection itself and how we can verify if this is a closed or active connection...