By popular request, the SQL Customer Advisory Team has collected our lessons learned about tuning data loading into a new whitepaper. We call it the “Data Loading Performance Guide” and you can find it on MDSN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library...

In data warehouses, it is quite common that fact records arrive with a source system key that has not yet been loaded in the dimension tables. This phenomena is known as “late arriving dimensions” or “early arriving facts” in Kimball terminology. When...

Saw an amazing BI demo this morning at the BI Conference here in Seattle. Donald Farmer showed how over 20M rows of data can be modeled and analyzed in memory. To build a model today, a DBA needs to define dimensions and fact tables, get the relationships...

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...

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...

Thomas and I updated the SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Performance Guide principally to address features available in the latest release. But there was one important change related to partition size driven by changes in hardware. The earlier version...

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...

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...

If you are view the XMLA script that is generated for an Analysis Services database, you will notice that there are both ID and NAME attributes. The reason Analysis Services has this differentiation is so one could rename an Olap database (which you could...

Under Windows Server 2000 and 2003 (RTM), the interrupts from a single network adaptor (NIC) cannot be handled by multiple CPU Cores. A Deferred Procedure Call (DPC) call gets scheduled to run as a consequence of the NIC firing an interrupt. The DPC will...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

There is plenty of material available to help you upgrade to SQL Server 2008. This blog is intended as a short list for the most useful guidance that I have found. And you may have different experiences upgrading from SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005...

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...

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...

Tom Davidson wrote: I've been working with database applications for the last 25 years. A particular area of interest for me is SQL Server performance. As part of the Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) for the last 7 years...

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...

In a recent engagement with an ISV, we’ve run into a sporadic application failure problem when the application is deployed in a mixed environment. It comes down to finding out which version of SQL Server driver the application uses for connection...

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...

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...