Bob Ward, Keith Elmore and I establish goals for every release of SQL Server.   A primary goal is always to make supporting the SQL Server easier.  Not just in the sense of Microsoft support, although it does play a factor, but more so for you (the customer). During SQL Server 2012 planning...

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 with the batch in which they ran, and show plans...

  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 found in the trace that was malformed. ...

The is more of an FYI blog post but I have read several blog and forum posts on this subject and I decided to dig into the behavior which revealed a trace bug. For the vast majority of events the Session Login Name represents the originating session credentials where as the Login Name represents the...

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 Mechanisms SQL Azure is secure, isolated, multi...

My high school English teacher once told me that I should always have a spell checker on my computer.   This might help explain why I never make it past the first couple of chapters in any technical publication before I have to ' try-it-out .' Over the last month I have spent several of my...

A short but good discussion about the RML comparison DIFF calculations.   From: Robert Dorr Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 10:21 AM Subject: RE: MSDN Blogs: Contact request: RML Tools: Estimated Comparison Differences   Thanks for the question and feedback.   For example ProjectedCPUDiff...

Summary ReadTrace processing may unexpectedly fail with the following error: A serious error condition (true == pVariant->FIsUnknownType()) has been encountered.                 Utility Error: Attempt to use an invalid variant...

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 2008 for your ReadTrace processing, or as the...

You can place ORCA on a central computer and allow it to control the sequencing from multiple client computers running OSTRESS.    To accomplish this you must configure the firewall properly. Note: Be sure to install the same version of the RML utilities on all machines.   ...

Summary We've lately gotten several questions from users regarding ReadTrace and how to workaround when your input trace files contain MARS (Multiple Active Result Sets).  ReadTrace currently does not support processing MARS and you will need to use one of the following two workarounds to continue...

At first glance it appears that ReadTrace has generated an unexpected connect node.  Upon closer inspection the behavior is correct in order to maintain the proper set options for the connection. Trace has both physical and logical connect/disconnect events.   The logical is indicated...

Summary When using the RML utilities the logged message or documentation can indicate that use of a trace flag is necessary to change behavior. More Information The RML Utilities use command line parameter ( -T ) as a trace flag to alter the utilities behavior.  The term trace flag is a hold over...

Summary In rare circumstances ReadTrace may encounter the following SQL Server 2008 assertion error when attempting to execute a parallel query. 11/03/08 00:05:35.139 [0X00003B94] Dumping error record 1 of 2: 11/03/08 00:05:35.139 [0X00003B94] --------------------------------------------------------...

Summary An index out of bounds error can occur while rendering a report in Local Report Viewer Mode with more than one dataset. Outer Exception: Object reference not set to an instance of an object, an error occurred during rendering of the report. Inner Exception: System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index...

The Senior Escalation Engineers do various training and mentoring activities. As I do this I thought I would try to propagate some of this information on the blog. This was an interesting issue I ran into this week. The reported problem was that the data shown as TEXT for an RPC event did not match...

As I promised at the PASS 2007 Summit in Denver, I'm writing a post here about the popular RML Utilities better known and READTRACE and OSTRESS. Our goal was to have this fully ready and posted on the web for public download by Thanksgiving. That day has arrived but we are not quite ready to post the...