CSS SQL Server Engineers

In SQL Server 2008 some of the memory based DMVs show memory node id 0 when you might not expect them to.   For example you could see the following on a single, node system. SQL 2008 memory_clerk_address  type                     ...

Applies To:   SQL 2008, 2008 R2 and Denail builds The SQL Server developer can elect to partition memory allocations at different levels based on the what the memory is used for.   The developer may choose a global, CPU, Node, or even worker...

While working recently with a  customer, it was brought to my attention that while SQL Server has a great feature to compress backups (introduced in SQL Server 2008), the space consumed by the backup before it is complete may not be as expected. ...

Lately we got a customer who called in and reported  that a particular statement involving a temp table always got recompiled and caused performance problems.   We have a KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/243586   which documents...

I have been asked how to automate SQLIOSim on several occasions.  SQLIOSim is a utility to test SQL Server I/O integrity ( not performance ) patterns against a system without needing to install SQL Server on the system.  It ships with SQL Server...

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...

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...

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...

  A lot of you are probably familiar with pssdiag tool released for SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 and sqldiag.exe utility shipped with SQL Server 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2. These are data collection diagnostics tools that allow collecting data such as profiler...

Recently, I worked with a customer who reported out of memory errors from his SQL Server 2008 R2 with 32GB of RAM.   One of the errors is 701 error (Error: 701, Severity: 17, State: 123. There is insufficient system memory in resource pool ...

In Part 1 , we looked at getting ADFS actually installed, for Part 2, we will see what we need to do to get it working with SharePoint 2010. Being that I focus on Reporting Services, the end goal here is to see how it work with Reporting Services. However...

I've had a few cases that involved customers using ADFS, SharePoint and Reporting Services. When going through this, one of the big struggles was just getting ADFS up and running with SharePoint 2010 so we could focus on the customer's issue. I did find...

You might have seen our earlier blogs around different snapshot related errors and the techniques available to address them. Among all those, one piece that was missing is the ability to track the specific write activity that goes against the snapshot...

I just worked a case that took a little bit to figure out and involved some pretty deep debugging, but I figured I would get something out to explain the behavior to hopefully prevent someone else from having to go through the debugging that I just went...

This post is directly from an issue I have been working on.  The behavior is very difficult to simulate because of the flags and timings involved.   In this post I will attempt to describe the scenario and provide you with a simple workaround...

I recently had two different people suggest the same (unfortunately unsupported) solution to the fact that there is no supported way of doing a linked server to SQL Azure directly from inside of SQL Server.  Since the reason the proposed solution...

Recently I worked with a customer who reported a slow running query.  Let me simplify this to illustrate the problem.   There are two tables  t1 (pk int identity primary key, c1 int, c2 int, c3 int, c4 varchar(50)) and  t2 (pk...

I can't take the credit for all this content as much of the investigation was done by Curt Mathews (SQL Server Escalation Engineer). We are finding that folks want to test the failover abilities of AlwaysON but after a single failover it no longer seems...

I am happy to announce that CSS SQL Azure Diagnostics (CSAD) has been released. Since you cannot use PSSDiag/SQLDiag against SQL Azure, I decided to develop this tool to shorten the data collection process when troubleshooting SQL Azure issues. You can...

A .NET Security Update (MS11-028) may end up causing issues with applications that make use of the .NET Framework, mostly resulting in applications being unable to launch, or loss of functionality within Native Applications that make use of .NET. In some...