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...

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...

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...

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, 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: 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: 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...

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, 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: 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...

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...

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: Nicholas Dritsas Reviewers: Akshai Mirchandani, Kevin Cox, Lubor Kollar, Thomas Kejser Writeback consists of two distinct processes. The first one is an update cube process that updates the current session with the changes. Only the...

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...

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: Nicholas Dritsas Reviewers: Thomas Kejser, Stuart Ozer In SSAS 2005 and later, there is a dimension property called ProcessingGroup. It has two values; ByAttribute (default) and ByTable. When you use ByAttribute, SSAS will send a SELECT...

Author : Denny Lee Reviewers : Prem Mehra, Kevin Cox With the terabytes of data that are being stored today - truly representing the data explosion that we've always talked about - it's becoming more and more difficult to provide an audit trail or...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I’m happy to announce availability of an updated version of the SQL Server Partition Management tool – now offering full support for SQL Server 2008 as well as improvements in handling SQL Server 2005. The tool is available along with source code at http...

If you have experimented with cube design in SQL Server 2008, you will probably have run into the new AMO design warnings in Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS). We find that these warnings help customers a lot: they allow them to quickly...

Author: Nicholas Dritsas Reviewers: Lubor Kollar, Michael Thomassy, Sanjay Mishra SQL Server 2008’s latest feature pack, that can be found here , contains a new Oracle connector by Attunity that supports Oracle versions 9.2.0.4 and higher. When...

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...