Author: Thomas Kejser Reviewers: Peter Adshead, Nicholas Dritsas, Sanjay Nayyar, John Desch, Kevin Cox, Akshai Mirchandani, Anne Zorner In this blog we will describe an important optimization that you should apply to cubes that are processed often and...

Wanted to let the community know the SQL Server Product Group just released version 4.2 of the SQL Server Migration Assistant! With this version, Microsoft has announced the release of the first version of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) for MySQL...

Introduction Now that you have your database set up in SQL Azure , the next step is to load your data to this database. Your data could exist in various sources ; valid sources include SQL Server, Oracle, Excel, Access, flat files and others. Your data...

I recently returned from Convergence 2010; the annual North American Microsoft Dynamics User Conference in Atlanta. It was a really great conference with many Customer, Partner, and Microsoft presentations and success stories. It was inspiring to see...

There are many reasons to go to TechEd North America 2010 in New Orleans this year. After all, it is THE event for developers and IT Professionals. And if you want to know more about PowerPivot, here’s yet another reason why you need to go. There...

The SQLCAT team and the SQL Azure team have been working closely together with a number of customers even before we launched our CTP (Community Technology Preview) in November, 2009 at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference). After our production...

We have been pretty excited about the last few weeks where there has been a lot of buzz about SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM. As noted in the SQL Server Data Platform Insider blog posting , this release has a lot of interesting features and is a major release...

Author: Mike Ruthruff Contributors: Gert Drapers, Fabricio Voznika Reviewers: Prem Mehra, Jimmy May, Kun Cheng During a recent performance lab we encountered a large number of waits related to the use of distributed transactions. The specific application...

Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Wanda He, Kevin Cox, Michael Thomassy, Peter Scharlock In a recent customer engagement, I ran into an interesting situation, which I’d like to share, especially with SQL Server users using Microsoft JDBC drivers. It started...

Author: Sanjay Mishra Reviewers: Prem Mehra, Mark Souza, Kun Cheng, Nicholas Dritsas, Thomas Kejser Recently I worked with a customer who has deployed database mirroring for a very large database (~ 1 TB) between two data centers that are about 400 miles...

In SQL Server 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2 Database Mirroring works at the individual database level. One challenge to using database mirroring is to keep your important SQL Agent jobs enabled or disabled depending on a database's current mirroring role. If...

Author: Sanjay Mishra Reviewers: Prem Mehra, Alexei Khalyako, Kun Cheng, Mike Ruthruff, Thomas Kejser, Sunil Agarwal To enable read committed snapshot isolation (RCSI) on a database, one needs to execute the following command: ALTER DATABASE <db_name>...

Author: Thomas Kejser Reviewers: Juergen Thomas, Sanjay Mishra, Stuart Ozer, Lubor Kollar, Kevin Cox, Kun Cheng In this blog, we will provide additional details on a well-hidden feature in SQL Server 2008 – partition-level locking. But before we illustrate...

SQL Server 2008 R2 added a much requested feature: Unicode compression. It addresses the need to compress Unicode strings. It is implemented as part of ROW compression, which was added in SQL 2008. That is; if ROW compression (on SQL 2008 R2) is enabled...

Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Peter Carlin, Mike Ruthruff, Thomas Kejser, Nicholas Dritsas XML data type is usually used to store semi-structured data with great flexibility and query capabilities. It’s a good choice for developing platform agnostic applications...

Author: Darko Sancanin, Nicholas Dritsas Reviewers and contributors: Lubor Kollar, Stuart Ozer, Michael Thomassy Business Case There are currently over 50 million files (over 10 Terabytes of data) that the customer is migrating into a custom project management...

When we talk to Data Warehouse customers – they often raise questions about the star joins improvements SQL Server 2008. Star join is a set of optimizations that provide some interesting performance gains in data warehouse workload. Instead of digging...

Author: Thomas Kejser Reviewers: Peter Byrne, Sunil Agarwal, Prem Mehra, Peter Scharlock, Lindsey Allen, Mark Souza As part of your database monitoring, you may be keeping track of the free space in the transaction log. One reason to do this, is to detect...

Authors : Sedat Yogurtcuoglu and Thomas Kejser Technical Reviewers : Kevin Cox, Denny Lee, Carl Rabeler, Dana Kaufman, Jesse Fountain, Alexei Khalyako, Dana Kaufman Overview Data type conversion is one of the most common ETL tasks used in Microsoft® SQL...

The installation of PowerPivot for SharePoint can be a little complex at times - especially the PowerPivot for SharePoint multi-server farm scenario. In order to help with this, the Analysis Services team and the SQLCAT team came together and created...

As you may already know, the new name for Project Gemini is PowerPivot and the official names are PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint. For information and to sign up for notification on the release dates, check out the official PowerPivot...

Are you going to SQLPASS in Seattle on Nov 3 rd -Nov 5 th ? If you are going or even thinking about it, then read about how you can spend some quality time with the SQLCAT team. We will be there with our famous ugly lime green shirts, so you won’t miss...

Author: Thomas Kejser Reviewers and Contributors: Bob Ward, Michael Thomassy, Juergen Thomas, Hermann Daeubler, Mark Souza, Lubor Kollar, Henk van der Valk (Unisys) and Peter Scharlock For advanced troubleshooting and understanding of SQL Server, you...

Implementing a hierarchy structure in a relational data base normally takes a bit of work. The new SQL Server data type for hierarchyID gives a good shortcut to the old methods, makes it faster to get a solution in place and makes it much easier to maintain...

Gemini is the code name for the new breakthrough Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities being delivered in the SQL Server 2008 R2 release. Gemini enables end users to build BI applications by integrating data from a variety of sources, modeling...