Attached is a sample Merge Conflict Handler sample I created.  I am including a walkthrough of the sample below.   1.   Create the sample merge publication/subscription databases Code Snippet:  From file  <1-CreatePub_Sub_DBs...

  There will be an upcoming Knowledge base article detailing this out as well   When you append a compressed backup to an existing Media, it inherits the compression setting from the Media set.   If you rely on the ‘backup compression’...

One common misconception about how merge replication handles column-level tracking (detection) is that when a conflict is encountered, the winning row will include column values which did not conflict in addition to the "winning columns". For...

  Based on Paul Randal’s post telling how to get the last known good DBCC ran against a database, based on my job requirements, I decided to write a T-SQL script which has nothing new but returns last known good DBCC execution time and last backup...

So what is part II about? It is about a change in Standard 64 bit Editions of SQL Server 2005 and 2008. This change implements the support of AWE APIs and “Lock Pages in Memory” privilege by these editions.   It has been already advertised by Bob...

You may want to consider enabling Instant File Initialization (via SE_MANAGE_VOLUME_NAME a.k.a. "Perform volume maintenance tasks") for your SQL Server startup/service account. This option allows for much faster data file allocations (CREATE...

A deadlock is a special type of situation wherein two or more transactions are waiting for the other to finish, and thus neither ever does and no one can proceed. Deadlocks can be often considered as normal in a high concurrent update environment. When...

You may have questioned why, on 64 bit enterprise Edition, DBCC MEMORYSTATUS reports non zero “AWE allocated” memory even if ‘AWE enabled’ option is not enabled. A short description of SQL Server memory model will help to answer. Here is an example of...

In 2005 and 2008, SQL Server Analysis Services allows users to store partition data in a non-default location. That is something we could not do in 2000 version. To store a partition data in a non-default location means that you can have the partition...

To load and process the data into Analysis Services, SQL Integration Services provides two data flow components: Partition Processing Destination and Dimension Processing Destination . However, I found very few users know how to use them or use them correctly...

I ran into a scenario a while ago that I thought I would share, where we were troubleshooting high CPU on  SQL Server.  The sporadic High CPU ( 90+ % )  pretty much brought the box down to its knees for a period of 5-10 minutes minutes...

Summing a SQL Analysis Services calculated measure result within a Reporting Services report gives #Error but the same calculated measure output can be summed within Analysis Services perfectly fine. Environment: SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services and...

This question has often been asked by customers who have a lot of DTS packages and want to continue running these packages on SQL 2008 servers running on Windows 2008 or Vista machines while they work on redesigning the packages to use the new features...

Several weeks ago one of our customers encountered an issue in which an index maintenance job that had always completed successfully, began failing with each nightly run. While troubleshooting the issue, the customer ran the DBCC OPENTRAN command against...

In Reporting Services String Parameters are of type Unicode. This could have unwanted side effects if comparing with a varchar ( or non-unicode data type) on the data source due to conversions that could occur from the non-Unicode column to the Unicode...

Report Builder 2.0 on SQL 2008 and ClickOnce I have got the "how to enable Report builder 2.0 ClickOnce" question more than once and hence thought I would post it. In order to get Report builder 2.0 Clickonce,you need the New Sharepoint Add-in which...

There are several dynamic management objects (DMOs) that I use on an ongoing basis in performance tuning scenarios. However, I’ve lately gained an increased appreciation of the sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats DMO. This 44 column (as of SQL 2008) DMO...

There are some changes in behavior in Reporting Services Charts with regards to “Empty Points” between SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd207051.aspx ) Let us consider the following Dataset: create table #TestChart...

This is the first post for the SQL Server Premier Field Engineer blog. This first post won’t be technical; but moving forward you’ll see us post various SQL Server field observations, findings and best practices from our large and diverse Premier Field...