Partitioning of tables in SQL Server is commonly used since the transparent partitioning was introduced in SQL 2005. No longer need for union all views and stuff like that, just insert, update, delete on a table without the need to remember how the table...

I did some tests with the HDInsight CTP implementation on Windows. I have used the one on my own server machine not the HDInsight for Azure. I have installed it, and did the example that comes with the CTP. Ok, it worked, but I wanted to upload some...

In one of my last projects I have had the following challenge: The customer wanted me to encrypt a sensitive column in the database, better say in a dimension table. But, the column must show up in the cube when browsing, and it has to be clearly readable...

I have had a problem at a customer where a source query in a data flow task was slow. I ran the query in Management Studio and it was fast. There was a filter in the query to limit the data for one day, realized with two SSIS Variables passed to the query...

I have worked a lot with SSIS the last few months, and in every project with SSIS I come across the fact that SSIS treats strings with regards to upper and lowercase. Today SQL Server databases are in nearly 99% of all cases installed as case-insensitive...

I wanted to share some questions I came across during a migration from Sybase ASE to SQL Server 2008. Is it possible to do a transactional replication from SQL Server to Sybase? Yes, it is. You can replicate via the Sybase OLE DB driver, if you...

A few weeks ago I had a small SQL consolidation project. The target was to consolidate five stand-alone SQL Servers (SQL 2000 and 2005) and one SQL 2005 cluster. When consolidating, first of all you must know about the workload on those servers. But how...