SQL Server Premier Field Engineer Blog

The Case of the Phantom Spid: Troubleshooting and Resolving an Orphaned DTC Transaction

Several weeks ago one of our customers encountered an issue in which an index maintenance job that had always completed successfully, began failing with each nightly run. While troubleshooting the issue, the customer ran the DBCC OPENTRAN command against

Possible performance implications when using string parameters in Reporting Services

In Reporting Services String Parameters are of type Unicode. This could have unwanted side effects if comparing with a varchar ( or non-unicode data type) on the data source due to conversions that could occur from the non-Unicode column to the Unicode

Enabling/Disabling Report builder 2.0 on SSRS 2008 in SharePoint integrated mode

Report Builder 2.0 on SQL 2008 and ClickOnce I have got the "how to enable Report builder 2.0 ClickOnce" question more than once and hence thought I would post it. In order to get Report builder 2.0 Clickonce,you need the New Sharepoint Add-in which was

Three Usage Scenarios for sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats

There are several dynamic management objects (DMOs) that I use on an ongoing basis in performance tuning scenarios. However, I’ve lately gained an increased appreciation of the sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats DMO. This 44 column (as of SQL 2008) DMO