CSS SQL Server Engineers

PLEASE NOTE: This blog post has been updated from its original posting to clarify other details about installation of SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1. I must say that I'm personally proud to see our release of SQL Server 2008. I've been involved...

In SQL Server 2005, we introduced a different method than in previous versions to rebuild system databases (affectionately known as "rebuild master"). You were required to use the setup.exe program with command line switches. This is no different...

The dust has now settled after the release of SP2 for SQL Server 2005 so I thought I would take some time to explain a few details about the re-release of Service Pack 2 and the fixes that have been posted by Microsoft since this re-release. There is...

Huh? This is not meant to be a brain teaser. The purpose of this post is to help you avoid problems with SQL Server 2008 setup before you run..well setup. Why not take advantage of known fixes we have for setup to avoid the problem in the first place...

I have been answering questions on two of the most misunderstood ‘SQL Server Urban Legends’ frequently again so I decided to make a post about them. ·          SQL Server Uses One Thread Per Data...

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...

A few questions have come up about the differences between the features you can install on SQL Server 2008 called Management Tools - Basic   and Management Tools - Complete. So I thought I'd blog about these to resolve any questions you might have...

Many of you may have read my post about dependencies with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 and SQL Server 2008. I have some related information to provide to you about SQL Server 2008 Express. If you are a user of SQL Server 2008...

One of the things I often try to do is make sure I understand the experience of customers when installing new versions of SQL Server or existing versions of SQL Server on new Windows Operating Systems. So I took a recent tour of the experience installing...

Work continues around the working set issues. You can find the latest and greatest Information: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918483 =========================================================== I spent several days last week investigating reported...

We have had a number of people ask about how they can get the Jet ODBC driver/OLE DB Provider as 64 bit.  Windows only ships the 32 bit versions of these.  The answer is that the windows versions won’t be x64 as those items are deprecated. ...

12/10/2009: Significant updates to the blog. Check back in 2010 for more updates to the wait type table As part of my talk at the 2009 US PASS Summit here in Seattle called Inside SQL Server Wait Types , I’m creating this blog post as a reference...

This message has come across my desk a couple of times in the last week and when that happens I like to produce blog content. The error is when you are trying to use a pooled connection and the reset of the connection state encounters an error. Additional...

Many of you have used the SQL Server 2000 blocker script (see KB 271509 ) to help troubleshoot performance issues in SQL 2000. If you haven't used it, you probably use a script of your own that takes a similar approach, polling sysprocesses and virtual...

    The Microsoft SQL Server support team uses several internally-written utilities to make it easier to work on a typical customer support case. These utilities may also be useful to database developers and system administrators who work with...

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...

IMPORTANT: The following KB article adds support for Locked Pages to SQL Server Standard Edition http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970070 NOTE: I've updated this because of some questions about 32bit systems. Some who attended one of my talks at...

The following article has been publiched about this subject: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931279 RDTSC Drift vs Not Synchronized To clarify - SQL Server 2005 SP2 contains both Drift and a Non Synchronized warnings. The Non Synchronized...

I realize that the topic of “locked pages’ and AWE can be confusing. I don’t blame anyone for being confused on this. I also realize we have blogged and talked about this topic many times perhaps “beating it to death”. And I certainly know this is not...

Some of you may have noticed I haven’t posted a blog in some time. Well, I’ve been a bit busy working behind the scenes on a new tool we released this weekend, the SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA). You may remember that I announced this...

I have spent probably hundreds of hours on cases involving TCP Offloading and I know most of the signs (intermittent dropped connections, missing traffic in network traces).  However, I have to admit I got burned by it the other day and spent several...

TCP Chimney is enabled by default if you apply Windows Server 2003 Sp2.  This is an operating system feature that provides capability to offload TCP/IP packet processing from the processor to the network adapters and some other balancing options...

Overview The error: 1450/1452 insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service. These are not a SQL Server based errors. The error cause is related to a depleted system resource (non-paged pool, paged pool ,...). These issues have...

UPDATE:  This fix was published in mid-February as http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2640696 .  We are still working on fine-tuning all of the documentation so that everything points to the appropriate places, but the binaries are already available...

UPDATE TO THIS POST: We now have a fix for this problem as documented at 968829 FIX: Error message when you try to upgrade an instance of SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008: "Wait on the Database Engine recovery handle failed. Check the SQL Server...