We are proud to announce that the community technology preview (CTP) of Apache TM Hadoop TM -based Services for Windows Azure (or Hadoop on Azure) is now available. As noted in on the SQL Server Data Platform Insider blog, the CTP is by invite only http...

Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Shaun Tinline-Jones, Silvano Coriani, Steve Howard, Thomas Kejser, Sanjay Mishra A computed column is computed from an expression that can use other columns in the same table. The expression can be a noncomputed column...

Author: Thomas Kejser Contributors/Reviewers: Alexei Khalyako, Jerome Halmans, Fabricio Voznika, Sedat Yogurtcuoglu, Mike Ruthruff, Tobias Ternstrom and Steve Howard In this blog, I will explore ideas for extending SQL Server with new, fast hash functions...

As announced during the PASS Summit 2011 Day One Keynote , we are diving deeper into the world of Big Data by embracing and contributing to the open source community and Hadoop. We’ve had a lot of good coverage on this topic with some examples...

Author : Shaun Tinline-Jones Reviewers : Mike Ruthruff, Sanjay Mishra, Alexei Khalyako Not too long ago an ISV that developed solutions using SQL Server as the RDBMS, asked me how they could query a database as at a point in time. This was a relatively...

The SQLPASS 2011 summit is upon us again and all of our flocking to our fair city Seattle for our yearly technical-and-karoke fest! If you are up for some technical deep dives, here is the list PASS sessions presented by SQLCAT! And don’t forget...

Author : Kun Cheng Reviewers : Thomas Kejser, Curt Peterson, James Podgorski, Christian Martinez, Mike Ruthruff Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) was introduced in Windows 2003 to improve Windows scalability to handle heavy network traffic, which is typically...

Author : Shaun Tinline-Jones Technical Reviewers : Thomas Kejser, Steve Howard, Jaime Alva Bravo, Kun Cheng, Jimmy May Note: Validation for this post was performed in the SQL CAT Customer Lab on an HP Proliant DL580 G7 , Intel Xeon Nehalem E7...

As noted in our blog post Announcing SSAS Maestros v1.2 , we had a great Analysis Services Level 500 deep dive sessions in Redmond and Madrid back in June/July 2011. Saying this, we do have some quick updates on the SSAS Maestros current status: ...

Author: Chuck Heinzelman Reviewers: Kevin Cox, Dan Jones, Lara Rubbelke During a customer engagement, we noticed a query that was taking a long time to execute. We saw that the query had a scalar-valued User Defined Function (UDF) encapsulating...

Recently, a problem was presented to me by a DBA using SQL Server 2008 R2. He could not attach a database whose files had been copied from another server. This blog talks about the situation and the solution. Here are the steps he went through to arrive...

Author: Chuck Heinzelman Reviewers: Kevin Cox, Kun Cheng, Michael Thomassy In a recent customer engagement, I was presented with a problem that I have seen in the past and am surprised that I don’t see more often. Take the following table...

We are proud to announce that SQLCAT will continue with the SSAS Maestros course in June and July in Redmond and Madrid. SSAS Maestros 1.2 Courses Join us for a five-day deep-dive course on Analysis Services 2008 R2 UDM and join the SSAS Maestro...

Exciting news as earlier this week the SQL Server Product Group announced the release of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v5.0! A product with the goal of further simplifying the user experience in automating the migration of Oracle, Sybase, MySQL...

Author : Shaun Tinline-Jones Reviewers: Lubor Kollar; Conor Cunningham; Steve Howard; Kun Cheng; James Podgorski; Jimmy May; Joseph Sack; Welly Lee; Neeraj Joshi; Keith Bauer Introduction We recently assisted a global ISV to address a performance...

Author: Chuck Heinzelman Reviewers: Steve Howard, Carl Rabeler, Shaun Tinline-Jones, Mike Weiner, Murshed Zaman I was recently involved in a customer lab testing the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack. I noticed an interesting behavior when...

Authors: Kevin Cox & Michael Thomassy Contributors: Lubor Kollar Technical Reviewers: Shaun Tinline-Jones, Chuck Heinzelman, Steve Howard, Kun Cheng, Jimmy May Overview Connecting directly to a SQL Azure database from a reporting tool...

Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Sunil Agarwal, Steve Howard, Shaun Tinline-Jones, Prem Mehra, Sanjay Mishra, Michael Thomassy, Mike Ruthruff, Howard Yin, Jimmy May During a recent ISV partner engagement, we decided to enable RCSI (Read Committed Snapshot...

by Denny Lee As many of you know from the various blogs, whitepapers, and conferences from SQLCAT, there is a big obsession or compulsion toward I/O by various members of SQLCAT. If you’re not already familiar with this topic, definitely reference...

Author: Sunil Agarwal Reviewers: Kun Cheng, Chuck Heinzelman, Shaun Tinline-Jones, Sanjay Mishra, And Kevin Liu Have you ever encountered a situation where a query was running fine yesterday but today it is running a lot slower? I am sure most of us...

Author: Sunil Agarwal Reviewers: Kun Cheng, Chuck Heinzelman, Shaun Tinline-Jones, Sanjay Mishra, And Kevin Liu When a transaction T1 modifies a row, it takes an X lock on the row for the duration of the transaction. If another concurrent transaction...

Author: Sunil Agarwal Reviewers: Kun Cheng, Chuck Heinzelman, Shaun Tinline-Jones, Sanjay Mishra, Kevin Liu Recently I was working with a customer who was surprised to see blocking when accessing a data row which was not locked? Let me describe the...

Author: Sunil Agarwal Reviewers: Kun Cheng, Chuck Heinzelman, Shaun Tinline-Jones, Sanjay Mishra, Kevin Liu When using NOLOCK hint on the table or using read uncommitted isolation level, customers sometimes get surprised when they experience blocking...

Author: Sunil Agarwal Reviewers: Kun Cheng, Chuck Heinzelman, Shaun Tinline-Jones, Sanjay Mishra, Kevin Liu In this series of blogs, I want to show some common concurrency questions that we get asked by customers. Before we look into common concurrency...

by Denny Lee (SQL Customer Advisory Team), Daniel Yu (SQL Marketing) Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of questions, tweets, and rumors about the SSAS Maestros program – some notable blogs include Kasper de Jonge’s Do you have...