CSS SQL Server Engineers

There is a bug with the message spelling (fasion instead of fashion) but that is not the focus of this post. When launching the SQL Server Configuration Manager you may receive this message if the WMI connections and queries do not complete within 30...

SQLDumper utility is used by various components of the product to generate and save diagnostic information in the form of mini-dump and other log files. You will normally find the output files [with extension .mdmp, .txt and .log] created by sqldumper...

Both SQL Server 2005 and 2008 allow you to do parallel index creation. In fact you can specify MAXDOP in create index statement. When you use MAXDOP (let's say 8), you would assume that 8 threads will do equal amount of work and finish the work at the...

Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 2:05 AM Subject: what is clean buffer? what is cold buffer cache? I got these terms from DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS , please guide me.   ================================================================== From: Robert Dorr...

  Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 4:24 AM Subject: Event Source changed from MSSQLServer to MSSQLSERVER to all upper case   Our different SQL server versions write to the Eventlog in a mixture of upper/lower case.  One version writes as Event...

NOTE: Now updated for SQL Server 2008 SP1 RTM. Last year you might have read my post where I showed you how to patch setup for RTM for SQL Server 2008 before you launch setup . This processing involved installing a Cumulative Update to apply fixes for...

Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 6:20 PM Subject: Ring Buffers in SQL2008   Hi, do you have any documentation/white papers/examples about extended dmv’s or ring buffers in SQL2008? select distinct ring_buffer_type from sys . dm_os_ring_buffers...

In general, you should avoid applying a scalar function on a column when comparing against another column, variable or constant. Let's use an example. Frequently, we got cases from customers who are not aware of performance implications and do just that...

We had a customer call up that encountered a problem when trying to create a new database for their Report Server through the Reporting Services Configuration Manager.  This is what they saw: When we clicked on the Error link, we saw the following...

You might be familiar with the sparse file problem that Bob Dorr has blogged about in the past. http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/07/10/sql-server-reports-operating-system-error-1450-or-1452-or-665-retries.aspx . We wanted to update you with the...

Last week I worked on an interesting case.   The issue was a NT Backup against a single volume containing 500 SQL Server databases.  It is rare to have so many databases on a single volume but it is possible and we had a case on this very...

I was asked by our support team to help outline performance counter troubleshooting when the counters don't appear, are missing or don’t seem to be working as expected.     I agreed to look into it and as you can see from the information...

I will be posting a troubleshooting companion to this 'How It Works' that outlines the associated troubleshooting steps for SQL Server base performance counter collection issues.    This post attempts to highlight the various components of the...