The Issue: A 64-bit process can load only 64-bit components in it's process boundary. Same is true for a 32-bit process also. So, if your application is 64 bit, you will need a 64-bit provider or driver to connect to Microsoft Access (mdb, accdb) or Microsoft Excel 2010 (xls, xlsx, and xlsb) or text...

  SQL Server 2005   The plan guides were first introduced in SQL Server 2005.You may find detailed information about the plan guides in SQL Server 2005 here:   General information http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187032(SQL.90).aspx     Description of sp_create_plan_guide...

I hear the complaint a lot that after a time period of no calls to Reporting Services, the first call to the Reporting Services instance is very slow. This is totally expected because the application pool generally gets spun down and we need to restart everything. If you wire up some basic web service...

An Analysis Services 2005 query against a calculation on a cell may report the error: "The expression contains a function that cannot operate on a set with more than 4,294,967,296 tuples." This may be because there are simply more underlying cells in the query than the supported maximum, but in some...

Many times, the key to solving these errors is a network packet trace. The problem is that these errors are often thrown intermittently. This can obviously make it problematic to capture a network trace. Network Monitor 3 (AKA Netmon3) solves this problem quite nicely. Netmon3 has the built-in...

In this series of posts, we’re going to take a look at some of the tools we at Microsoft Developer Support -- Database commonly use, how to use them, and the types of issues they can be used to resolve. In this article, Enamul Khaleque starts down the road of using WinDbg and AdPlus. Future articles...

How often should I expect to hear from my Support Engineer? This will vary based on the issue and its impact to your business. If you have specific preferences for frequency of contact, time of day, or method (prefer phone vs. e-mail), please discuss this with your support engineer. My Support...

In this series of posts, we’re going to take a look at some of the tools we at Microsoft Developer Support -- Database commonly use, how to use them, and the types of issues they can be used to resolve. In this article, Adam Saxton starts down the long road of double-hop troubleshooting by providing...

In this series of posts, we’re going to take a look at some of the tools we at Microsoft Developer Support -- Database commonly use, how to use them, and the types of issues they can be used to resolve. This post might seem like a bit of a stretch. For one thing, it’s not about a SQL related tool...

Finally, after rounds of CTPs (Community Technology Previews) and great feedback from customers, we have officially released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for SQL 2005. Download SP2 You can download it by visiting the Microsoft website here . Enhancements in SQL 2005 SP2 SP2 provides several new...

In the previous edition ( Data security enhancements in SQL Server 2005) , we talked about data encryption/decryption in general. In this installment, let’s talk about key maintenance. It is important to ensure that we can decrypt our data, even in case of user mistake or corruption. For...

The other day I was working on an issue with one of our customers. I had been having him run several different tests using a few of the tools that we use on the SQL Developer team on a daily basis. After about the third or fourth diagnostic we ran, he asked me something along the lines of: “how...

Background In August of 2005 the United States Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which changes the dates of both the start and end of daylight saving time (DST). When this law goes into effect in 2007, DST will start three weeks earlier (2:00 A.M. on the second Sunday in March) and will...

Avoiding reboots after applying a Service Pack or a hotfix to SQL is a big concern to our customers. In SQL 2005, we have made several enhancements to help you avoid a reboot after applying Service Packs and hotfixes. To learn about these enhancements, read our MSDN article here . Happy...

SQL 2005 no longer tracks licensing (per seat or per processor) via registry entries. SQL 2005 still reads the registry for this information, but the SQL 2005 setup doesn’t put licensing information in the registry during setup as in SQL 2000. This is by-design. Hence, when ServerProperty(‘LicenseType...

Have your Reporting Services 2005 reports started failing recently with the error message? Logon failed. (rsLogonFailed) Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007052E) Check your Unattended Execution Account (UEA). Is it a domain user? If so...

Through this blog, we will try to address commonly asked questions about MSDTC and SQL Server on a cluster. All this information is available in BOL and KB articles, but we will summarize it here for your convenience. Do I need to install MSDTC on my SQL Server 2005 cluster? Before installing...

Through this blog, we will address some of the commonly asked customer questions on SQL Server and Network Attached Storage (NAS). Support for NAS database files with SQL Server You can configure SQL Server to store a database on a networked server or NAS storage server. You need to enable trace...

It is important to understand that SQL Server database on compressed volumes are not supported. This blog will help you understand the differences between SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 w.r.t compressed drives. SQL 2000 In SQL Server 2000, you could create a new database with its .mdf and .ldf files...

We have seen many customers call in for this issue - launching SQL Server 2005 Tools (like Management Studio, Business Intelligence Studio) throws: Unhandled exception has occurred in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you...

If you have received SQL Server ISO images (as part of your MSDN subscription or as downloaded from MS website), the file names would look like these: en_sql_2005_ent_x86_cd1.iso en_sql_2005_ent_x86_cd2.iso where en represents English language SKU, ent represents Enterprise Edition...

After you apply SQL 2000 Service Pack 4, you might observe that a SPID is blocking itself, as reported in the output of sysprocesses. If your custom scripts/applications monitor blocking by relying on the output of sysprocesses column, they will start reporting extensive blocking on your server...

Through this blog, we will try to address common customer questions on log shipping in SQL 2005. Can log shipping be configured between SQL 2000 and SQL 2005? You cannot configure log shipping between SQL 2005 (as primary/secondary) and SQL 2000 (secondary/primary).| To demonstrate this, let...

You might run into a situation wherein the value of the auto-growth increment of your database files (.mdf, .ndf or .ldf) shows a very large value – e.g. 12800% This happens if you: Create the database by using a percentage value for the automatic growth increment of the database file...

This is a very common scenario and generates quite a few calls for us. SCENARIO Transaction log file is growing rapidly and has consumed all the disk space on your drive. You don’t have any free disk space left and can no longer perform data modification operations on your database. Additionally...