CSS SQL Server Engineers

I ran into a new Kerberos Scenario that I hadn’t hit before when I was working on the cases related to this blog post . It’s rare that I actually see a case related to the Named Pipes protocol.  When I do, it is usually a customer trying to get it...

I’m always amazed that issues usually come in batches.  I was looped into a few cases that had the following symptoms.   They were running SharePoint 2010 and Reporting Services 2012 SP1.  When they went to use a data source with Windows...

This blog outlines a new twist to my previous blog outlining issues with 4K sector sizes. SQL Server - New Drives Use 4K Sector Size: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/01/13/sql-server-new-drives-use-4k-sector-size.aspx In the previous post...

I was recently going through an exercise of documenting how to discover certain aspects of Reporting Services for some Kerberos work.  RS 2012 in SharePoint is a totally different game though.  The easiest way I could discover certain items...

The topic I received most in my inbox this week was redo blocked on a secondary while attempting to acquire SCH-M (schema modify) lock. First of all, this is expected behavior and you can monitor for this with your standard blocking activities (sys.dm_exec_requests...

The distinction between these two wait types is subtle but very helpful in tuning your Always On environment. The committing of a transaction means the log block must be written locally as well as remotely for synchronous replicas.   When in...

I keep running into the question: “When will my secondary allow automatic failover?”   Based on the question I did some extended research and I will try to summarize in is blog post.  I don’t want to turn this post into a novel so I am...

I had a very specific question asked of me related to the SQLIOSIM.exe, checksum validation logic.  It is pretty simple logic (on purpose) but effective so here are the basics. The key is that there are multiple memory locations used to hold the...

"Denzil and I were working on this issue for a customer and Denzil has been gracious enough to write-up a blog for all of us." – Bob Dorr From Denzil: I recently worked with a customer on a Database restore issue where the database being restored had...

The data source provider list in PowerPivot can often be a source of confusion for users since they equate the fact that a provider appears in the list as the provider being installed and available. Unfortunately, the list of providers is actually a static...

It has been well over a year when I wrote a series of blog posts about a product called System Center Advisor. You can read these posts at this link http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/tags/system+center+advisor/ When Advisor was first released, this...

In this blog, I will talk about a couple of things related to statistics update when rebuilding index on a partitioned table.   In past versions, when you rebuild an index, you will get statistics update equivalent to FULLSCAN for free.  ...

Recently, we received a call from a customer reported that a query was slow.  Upon further investigation, his query has a predicate that look like this: select * from t o where c1 >switchoffset (Convert(datetimeoffset, GETDATE()), '-04:00')  ...

I wanted to point out a nice performance improvement related to table valued parameters (TVP) in SQL Server 2012.   It’s not currently documented in our online documentation.   But we have had customers who inquired about this. When...

SQL Server has supported CLR usage since version 2005. But support of .NET framework assemblies within SQL Server is limited per our support policy in KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922672 . Some users chose to use .NET framework assemblies...

I've ran across the following error a few times and thought I would post this out there for people to understand what is happening. ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.OperationNotSupportedException: , Microsoft.ReportingServices...

We have had two blog posts on this blog regarding the 18056 error.  Two from Bob Dorr (and part 2 ) and another from Tejas Shah .  However, we still see a lot of questions about this error message. This error message can show up for different reasons...

I want to make you aware of a latest SQL Server 2008 hotfix documented in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2791745 .   Using large number of constants in IN clause can result in SQL Server termination unexpectedly.   When this happens...

I just wanted to put a quick note that QUERYTRACEON is now publically documented in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2801413/en-us .  If you have situations where you don’t want to enable an optimizer trace flag globally on your server instance, you...

Parameter sniffing is a well known among SQL User community.   But I have seen variations of this frequently that need a bit creative handling and solution may not that straight forward. One of the variation is that a user changes the value...

This blog is built directly from a customer reported issue.  As I helped investigate the source of the issue I thought it would be of interest to a broader audience – hopefully you find this interesting, as well. Allow me to provide some history...

Recently, I worked on an customer issue to help tune their slow query. The query was fairly complex involving multiple table joins. The key issue is the inability to do seeks on a particular table. The table has a column that stores User Name like...

I was setting up my SharePoint 2013 server to be able to use an Excel 2013 workbook that had a Power View Report in it.  However, when I tried opening the workbook, I got the following error: In the ULS logs of my SharePoint server that had RS installed...

We had a customer who was doing stress testing on a machine with 40 cores.   They designed a program that would launch multiple connections to execute the same query repeatedly based on their requirement to handle multiple concurrent executions...

The wait type of CMemThread shows up in outputs such as sys.dm_exec_requests.  This post is intended to explain what a CMemThread is and what you might be able to do to avoid the waits.  The easiest way to describe a CMemThread is to talk about...