Recently I looked at an issue when upgrading from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 and in the middle of the upgrade it would halt asking for a matching source for VSS Writer.  However, there is nothing descriptive to tell you what specific source...

Summary During OStress replay you encounter an error like the following and processing stops: 07/21/09 08:05:39.697 [0x00001C0C] QryBindColumnStorage: unknown/unhandled SQL datatype (-152), column number 25 (YourColumn) 07/21/09 08:05:40.697 [0x00001C0C...

Lately, we have a customer who reported that a query used to run 20 minutes in 2000 now run serveral hours in SQL 2008. After examining the plan, we discovered that the estimates were much more off in SQL 2008. Specifically, the query has a where condition...

I imagine that many of you are like me when it comes to purchasing software.   I want to take a test drive (evaluate) it before I buy it to make sure it really meets my needs.   You don't make a automobile purchase by just reading...

As a member of technical support, it does seem I see users pushing our software to the limit more than most. But how does Windows really behave when pushed to the limit on resources? Well an excellent series of blog posts is available for you to find...

Sorry Star Wars fans to mislead you. I thought our readers should know about a feature we use quite a bit in CSS called a “Clone Database”. It is better publically now known as a “Statistics-Only” copy of the database. Why is this useful? Because it provides...

I recently received a request to shed some light on a few advanced questions about latches and SQL Server. These were good questions so I thought the information might be useful to share with the community. I’ll provide this information in the form of...

I tend to get quite a bit of Kerberos related cases.  These are related across the box, from the Engine, to Reporting Services to just straight connectivity with custom applications.  I had one given to me yesterday because the engineer had...