We have noticed that when you install certain hotfixes (this includes Cumulative Update 1 and certain versions of security update MS11-049 etc. ) on an SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM Instance on which Utility Control Point is configured, the installer fails to...

Normally when you see high isolation level such as SERIALIZABLE is used, your natural instinct tells you that it may cause blocking or deadlocking.   But you may be surprised to know that it actually can cause high CPU as well.  When you...

In a previous blog I outlined how file stream transactions work and retain the before and after images of the file to allow various forms of recovery.  Reading that blog should be considered a prerequisite: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive...

One of the challenges of SQL Azure is that not all of the TSQL that you are used to using is supported yet.  Since the underlying engine is plain ole’ SQL Server, the engine can understand the TSQL, but we just block its use because we haven’t yet...

I left off my previous post stating that I was going to start looking at performance and reliability issues associated with SQL Azure.   In doing this work I discovered and encountered some of the protection mechanisms   SQL Azure Protection...

OK, OK – the title is a complete rip-off of Bob Ward’s post about SQL Server 7.0, but the sentiment is the same.  On June 25th, support for the the Microsoft JDBC driver versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 will end .  Much like SQL Server 7.0, the v1...