SQL Server 2008 R2 launches today! While the name “R2” sounds like an incremental update to SS2008 (or half of a Star Wars droid), in fact Kilimanjaro (the internal code name) is packed with big features. We’ve also got a lot to show for our work on performance and scalability. The four results at the...

We suppose a more appropriate title would have been: Better Late Than Never. David should begin by apologizing. Last month was the first anniversary of the ETL world record we set last year with SSIS, loading 1 TB of data in under 30 minutes. While Len did a nice blog post on the project at the time...

Glenn Paulley, Director of Engineering at Sybase iAnywhere, posted a commentary titled “ The State of TPC-E ” on his blog three weeks ago (10/3/08). A better title would have been “All TPC-E Results Are On Microsoft SQL Server. Why?” Mr. Paulley takes issue with Brian Moran’s statement that “ the most...

Just left the final shiproom meeting for SQL Server 2008, and am happy to say every team has signed off, so the product is now in the hands of manufacturing, and in process toward web and media availability for you. We've shipped! MSDN and TechNet subscriber downloads are now live, with more to come...

Today at the launch of SQL Server 2008, you may have seen the references to world-record performance doing a load of data using SSIS. Microsoft and Unisys announced a record for loading data into a relational database using an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tool. Over 1 TB of TPC-H data was loaded...

Microbenchmarking is the art of testing your machine's basic configuration like disk latency, memory latency, CPU performance using series of tests. You can find more details at: Types of benchmarks How do you assess the performance of a new machine with SQL Server? Do you run industry standard benchmarks...