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SQL Server: Clarifying The NUMA Configuration Information
The increased number of cores per socket is driving NUMA designs and in SQL Server support we are seeing more NUMA machines and less pure SMP machines. For whatever reason over the past 2 weeks I...
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Distributed Replay for SQL Server 2012
I recently had a lengthy exchange on DReplay with Jonathan Kehayias (SQL MVP). From this exchange I filed several work items with the SQL Server development team to help install and setup DReplay...
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Exporting via HTML instead of MHTML
There was a question on Twitter about how to display a report in HTML instead of MHTML due to some browser issues. Based on the fact that it was MHTML, I’m assuming we are talking about exporting a...
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A faster CHECKDB – Part I
Earlier this year I travelled to Japan having the opportunity to visit some of our customers and prospective customers. One feedback I received loud and clear was poor performance when using DBCC...
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Assigning SQL Server, SQL Agent to a Processor Group (OOM, Hang, Performance...
Suresh brought to my attention that we have been getting questions as to why SQL Server starts on group 1 and then group 2 and it is not predictable? Then Tejas brought up another issues and since I...
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How It Works: sys.dm_io_pending_io_requests
I have been working an issue where the DMV was returning io_pending_ms_ticks incorrectly. The following output is an example of ~164 hour delay. Unlikely to occur without any other side effects noted....
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How It Works: sys.dm_tran_session_transactions
For some reason I have been looking at DMV output closely the last couple of weeks. I just blogged about the pending I/O requests and now I have a behavior to outline for...
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The official release of System Center Advisor…
If you have followed this blog, you have probably seen a series of posts documenting the life of a project I’ve been working on, Atlanta, to a product called System Center Advisor. Today marks the...
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The case of the incorrect page numbers
As you may or may not know, SSRS 2008 R2 added the ability to automatically create page breaks on group changes. Historically, people attempted to use custom code to accomplish this and, while it...
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Management Studio tricks you may or may not know about
I was sitting through SQL Server 2012 training, and Ajay Jagannathan was showing us Management Studio. Eric Burgess had worked on this topic. He started covering some neat things, that have...
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Analysis Services Thread Pool Changes in SQL Server 2012
As part of the SQL Server 2012 release several changes were made to Analysis Services that should alleviate some issues previously seen on large NUMA node machines. Separation of IO and Processing Jobs...
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A faster CHECKDB – Part II
Note: Validation for this post was performed in the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (SQL CAT) Customer Lab on an HP Proliant DL385 G7 (overview | quickspec), AMD Opteron 6176 SE 2.3GHz dual socket...
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SQL Server 2012 - True Black Box Recorder
This would be a perfect time to post a blog talking about the new SQL Server 2012 features. However, I am going to leave that activity to the marketing folks (AlwaysOn, T-SQL Enhancements, …). I...
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Intro to Debugging a Memory Dump
I was discussing debugging with some folk internally that didn’t really have much exposure to it, but wanted to learn. I considered the items pretty basic and didn’t really dive into to much, but I...
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SetFileIoOverlappedRange Can Lead to Unexpected Behavior for SQL Server 2008...
You should be aware the Windows bug with API = SetFileIoOverlappedRange. This is used by SQL Server (2008 R2 and SQL 2012) only when Locked Pages has been enabled and is in use by the SQL Server. SQL...
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AlwaysON - HADRON Learning Series: Automated Failover Behaviors (Denali -...
Quite an encompassing title I will agree but the features all work together to build a really nice product. I had this tucked away during beta and thought it would be helpful to post. SQL Server...
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How It Works: XEvent Action vs Field data values.
I have seen several traces and questions relating to the output of the XEvent so I thought I would try to explain them a bit in an effort to reduce confusion. Terms Field == Event Data Action == Action...
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How It Works: Failover Cluster/Availability Group XEL Logging Frequency
I had a great question from my post on sp_server_diagnostics (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2012/03/08/sql-server-2012-true-black-box-recorder.aspx). As 'luck' would have it, Bob Ward, was...
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SQL Server 2012: RML, XEvent Viewer and Distributed Replay
Bob Ward, Keith Elmore and I establish goals for every release of SQL Server. A primary goal is always to make supporting the SQL Server easier. Not just in the sense of Microsoft support, although...
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How It Works: HealthCheckTimeout Interval Activities
As I wrote my recent blog posts and did more research I found that is would be helpful to highlight the HealthCheckTimeout behavior in more detail. Always On FCI (Failover Cluster Instance) vs Non-FCI...
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