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Dipping My Toes Into SQL Azure – Part 2 – Protection Mechanisms
I left off my previous post stating that I was going to start looking at performance and reliability issues associated with SQL Azure. In doing this work I discovered and encountered some of the...
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Tracking Down Missing Indexes in SQL Azure
One of the challenges of SQL Azure is that not all of the TSQL that you are used to using is supported yet. Since the underlying engine is plain ole’ SQL Server, the engine can understand the TSQL,...
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How It Works: FileStream (RsFx) Garbage Collection
In a previous blog I outlined how file stream transactions work and retain the before and after images of the file to allow various forms of recovery. Reading that blog should be considered a...
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Inappropriate usage of high isolation level isn’t just about blocking when it...
Normally when you see high isolation level such as SERIALIZABLE is used, your natural instinct tells you that it may cause blocking or deadlocking. But you may be surprised to know that it actually...
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SQL Server 2008 R2 does not start when applying certain hotfix updates
We have noticed that when you install certain hotfixes (this includes Cumulative Update 1 and certain versions of security update MS11-049 etc. ) on an SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM Instance on which Utility...
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Trace shows the incorrect Session Login Name
The is more of an FYI blog post but I have read several blog and forum posts on this subject and I decided to dig into the behavior which revealed a trace bug. For the vast majority of events the...
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How It Works: Return codes from SQLIOSim
I have been asked how to automate SQLIOSim on several occasions. SQLIOSim is a utility to test SQL Server I/O integrity (not performance) patterns against a system without needing to install SQL...
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Stored procedure recompile caused by alter table on temp table
Lately we got a customer who called in and reported that a particular statement involving a temp table always got recompiled and caused performance problems. We have a KB article...
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How compressed is your backup?…
While working recently with a customer, it was brought to my attention that while SQL Server has a great feature to compress backups (introduced in SQL Server 2008), the space consumed by the backup...
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SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 on Newer Machines with More Than 8 CPUs Presented per...
Applies To: SQL 2008, 2008 R2 and Denail builds The SQL Server developer can elect to partition memory allocations at different levels based on the what the memory is used for. The developer may...
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The DMV sys.dm_os_memory_clerks May Show What Appears To Be Duplicate Entries
In SQL Server 2008 some of the memory based DMVs show memory node id 0 when you might not expect them to. For example you could see the following on a single, node system. SQL 2008...
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The SQL PASS Summit comes again to Seattle and CSS will be there…
For the 9th year, the Microsoft CSS team will speak and meet customers at the SQL PASS Summit, being held this year in Seattle, Washington from October 11th through the 14th. As in past summits, CSS...
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Inside the SQL Server Clinic…
In my last post, I reviewed the Microsoft CSS involvement at the upcoming 2011 SQL Server PASS Summit. One big part as I’ve mentioned is the SQL Server Clinic. I thought you might find it interesting...
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RML Questions
The following questions have surfaced several times recently so I decided to post the answers to assist others. String is missing proper closing quote near (Char Pos: 0xC1 Byte Pos: 0x182) This is...
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After Applying SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Error 9013 is logged (The tail of the...
In SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 we made updates to dynamically accommodate disk drives that present physical sector sizes greater than 512 bytes. In practice, these are generally 4K, physical sector size...
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Yes–we made a mistake–and are finally going to fix it
If you are still using ADO in some of your code and tried to upgrade your build machine to Windows 7 SP1, you probably ran into the fact that you cannot run the recompiled program on downlevel OSes...
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Easy JDBC Logging
I have been supporting Microsoft’s JDBC driver for almost six years now and the one thing with which I always struggle is getting logging going. JDBC logging is probably some of the most useful...
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The week that was PASS 2011 & Moving on…
This is to recap my week at PASS Summit 2011. This was my 4th US PASS, and every year it is amazing. I really enjoy sharing information with the community as well as getting to meet the people I...
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Error 1803 and model size change in SQL Server 2012
Recently I encountered error 1803 when working on SQL Server 2012. The script I ran against a SQL Server 2012 instance was CREATE DATABASE [suspect_db] ON PRIMARY ( NAME = N'suspect_db', FILENAME =...
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RML: ReadTrace Appears To Hang at "Doing Post-Load Data Cleanup" Phase
Keith and I continue to field the question as to why the Post-Load Data Cleanup appears to take a long time (hours) and can cause SQL Server to use large amounts of CPU. Notes from Keith: "What that...
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