Authors : Silvano Coriani, Jasraj Dange, Ewan Fairweather, Xin Jin, Alexei Khalyako, Sanjay Mishra, Selcin Turkarslan Technical Reviewers : Mark Russinovich, Brad Calder, Andrew Edwards, Suraj Puri, Flavio Muratore, Hanuma Kodavalla, Madhan Arumugam...

One of the great enhancements in Microsoft's HDInsight distribution of Hadoop is the ability to store and access Hadoop data on an Azure Blob Store. We do this via the HDFS API extension called Azure Storage Vault (ASV). This allows you to persist data...

When I talk to people about adding self-service BI to their company's environment I generally get a list of reasons why it won't work. Some things I commonly hear: I can't get anyone in IT or on the business side to even try it. The business...

For my #SQLPASS Summit 2012 talk SQLCAT: Big Data – All Abuzz About Hive ( slides available to all | recording available to PASS Summit 2012 attendees ) I showed a mash-up of Hive, SQL Server, and Excel data that had been imported to PowerPivot...

A new version of the Partition Management Utility for SQL Server is now available on Codeplex at http://sqlpartitionmgmt.codeplex.com/ . This is a tool that helps you create necessary staging tables and indexes and associated check constraints, to support...

By: Nicholas Dritsas Reviewers: James Podgorski, Olivier Matrat, Sanjay Mishra Overview Azure’s Iaas VMs plus Virtual Networks can be used to configure easily a set of servers/VMs to host the main components of a BI solution. This process...

Author: Kevin Cox Contributors: Min He,Steve Lindell Reviewers: Sanjay Mishra, Juergen Thomas, Jimmy May Creating an availability group needs pings and status checks across the different servers involved. This accounts for approximately 500...

When using ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly to access a readable secondary via the Availability Group Listener, the login SIDs have to be the same between primary and secondary. The connection attempt generates an error saying the login does not exist. This...

Written by : Ed Katibah, Milan Stojic, Michael Rys, Nicholas Dritsas Technical reviewers : Chuck Heinzelman Introduction : Spatial Point Data queries require particular tuning efforts to enhance performance and improve overall application throughput...

The Technical Reference Guides for Designing Mission-Critical Solutions provide planning and architecture guidance for various mission-critical workloads deployed by users. These guides reflect the knowledge gained by the CAT team while working with customers...

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...