For the ultimate guide to upgrading to SQL Server 2008, please refer to the SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide . A successful upgrade to SQL Server 2008 should be smooth and trouble-free. To achieve that smooth transition, you must devote...

Thomas Kejser and I made some significant updates to the SQL Server Analysis Services Performance Guide for SQL Server 2008 - it's available here . Our hope is to keep it alive and make updates as necessary. So if there is something you'd like to see...

This blog is a result of lessons learned while working with the new Integrated Full Text Search in SQL Server 2008. It is not intended to be an in-depth tutorial on how to implement it. Instead, it will concentrate on best practices. The basics of how...

Recently, Wanda He from SQLCAT ISV team worked with Oracle Siebel group completed a new 12,000 concurrent users Siebel CRM 8.0 benchmark on SQL Server 2008 ( http://www.microsoft.com/isv/oracle/ ). The benchmark demonstrated that the combination of Microsoft...

Check out the the third of five technical note as part of the Building and Deploying Large Scale SQL Server Reporting Services Environments Technical Note Series: Reporting Services Scale-Out Deployment Best Practices This technical note reviews the...

Check out the new look and feel of the sqlcat.com ! Now you have easy access and views of our Top 10 Lists, Technical Notes, Whitepapers, and Toolbox. As well, now our blogs our mirrored to sqlcat.com for easy access to all SQLCAT tips, best practices...

The other day we got a call from a puzzled friend. He has rewritten a stored procedure using table variable instead of temp table, it makes the stored procedure code look more tidy. The puzzling part is the same stored procedure now running a lot slower...

After the great work from the ETL World Record (for more information, refer to our other blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlcat/archive/2008/09/18/scaling-heavy-network-traffic-with-windows.aspx ), Thomas and I (with the help of many others) have created...

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...

Coming up this November 18-21 st is the SQL PASS Conference in Seattle, WA (right in Microsoft’s backyard). See http://summit2008.sqlpass.org/ for all the details. This SQL PASS will be very special. The SQL Server engineering team is sending up to 300...

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...

Thomas Kejser and I are doing some work to produce the SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Performance Guide. Among a bunch of other things, it discusses the IIF function. But because I recently mentioned MDX query hints in a recent podcast, I wanted to...

OVERVIEW: One of the common complaints in using database snapshots is how to get queries and reports to switch over and start using the new snapshot as soon as it is available. There are three basic ways to accomplish this: 1. Delete the old and create...

Due to the improvements in the Windows Server 2008 memory manager related to the change in the algorithm for scanning pages in memory, SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services performed equally well during both partition and dimension processing with or without...

Reporting Services 2008 was able to respond to 3–4 times the total number of users and their requests on the same hardware without HTTP 503 Service Is Unavailable errors compared with Reporting Services 2005, regardless of the type of renderer. In stark...

After a few recent conversations with CIO and CTO types, I was amazed that there is still the concept out there that SQL Server doesn’t scale well. So I sat down to write a lengthy blog to dispel that rumor. After doing some research, I found that there...

One of the presenters at recent SQL Server Open World conference in Denmark ( http://www.miracleas.dk/index.asp?page=168&page2=323 ) suggested tuning SQL queries using logical IOs to measure quality of query plan. The IO count is returned for each...

Interesting observation with table > 1TB We have a project using SQL 2005 with a table that is several terabytes. This table has a varbinary(max) column with an average length of 150k bytes. We needed a second copy of the table on a smaller test...

Backup Compression in SQL2008 performs very well and it is easy to use. You could either use “With Compression” along with the “Backup” command or simply enable default backup compression through sp_configure by setting ‘backup compression default’ value...

Using SQL Server 2008 and SSIS 2008 the SQL Server Performance team working with Unisys and SQL CAT have shown SSIS scaling to world record performance! We loaded 1.18 TB in under 30 minutes . You can find more information here: http://blogs.msdn...

SQL Server 2008 is just around the corner. SQLCAT has been working with our customers and partners implementing pre-release builds. We have a lot good lessons learned to share, here are some of the upcoming best practices papers: · Index Defragmentation...

SQLCAT members have published several tools on Codeplex and other places. They are all consolidated here at SQLCAT.com. http://sqlcat.com/toolbox/default.aspx

The SQL Customer Advisory Team has put the final touches on the site http://sqlcat.com/ which is our new hub for all things that are part of the SQLCAT! Our new site is a portal to all SQLCAT resources including: Top 10 Lists : Summary list of Best...

As anyone working with partitioned tables knows by now, the process of creating stand-alone ‘staging’ tables to support switching data into or out of a partition can be a management challenge, especially if the design of the partition table or its indices...

At first I was going to write a detailed white paper about the conversion effort. But someone has already done it. There is a very good guide at: http://nationalcom.com/home/download/Conversion-VFP-SQLServer.pdf Since FoxPro is nearing its end of...