Want to try SQL Server 2012 without even installing it? Easy... use SQL Server 2012 Virtual Labs at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/video/Hh913731 !

User configurable events have been available in SQL Server since at least version 2000, but aren't often used, I suspect just because DBA's aren't familiar with them. Here's a screen shot of the Events Selection page of the Trace Properties for a SQL Server Profiler trace: Despite having all of...

I came up with the idea that perhaps we could let clients connect to a database in an AlwaysOn Availability Group (AG) by the current instance name instead of the virtual network name (VNN) if the cluster service crashed. This idea does not work. Microsoft Consultant Don Scott set up a very simple...

As a reminder for myself when I can't fire up the Installation Center, here are the screen shots. To make it slightly more interesting, I'm adding some notes about the differences from the 2008 R2 version. I'm also attaching a Word doc with the 2012 and 2008 R2 versions side by side for a friend who...

It's official, SQL Server 2012 goes on the market on Wednesday, March 7th, 2012! Update on Feb 27, 2012: Rats. I'm always careful not to divulge any confidential information, and I'm sure I got this date from an official source that did NOT state that it was confidential, and therefore I shared the...

Locks are used by relational database management systems to increase user concurrency (more users) while guaranteeing data consistency. A deadlock is when two locks interfere each other, and is caused by one process locking a row, page, partition, or table while it waits for another row, page, partition...

Well, it's almost the end of June and none of my draft posts are close enough to finishing to meet my self-imposed standard of at least one post per month. So, here's a pathetic little human-interest post. Microsoft has a Services group which provides a variety of support personnel to customers. Customers...

Here's a SQL Server PFE war-story to give one example of one of the kind of work we might do. Most of the customers I support run SharePoint services, and they use a variety of methods to provide disaster recovery capabilities. One method involves SQL Server's Database Mirroring capability to maintain...

This post is primarily an online note for myself, which I'll make public in case someone else might find it helpful, but here's one issue I've seen cause more confusion among my customers than any other regarding SQL Server clustering. The SQL Server installation process does not create a cluster --...

Where do SQL Server databases fit into the SharePoint architecture? Here's my non-expert understanding: A SharePoint instance (aka a SharePoint farm) has one or more Web Apps. A Web App has one or more Content Databases, where a Content Database is a single database in SQL Server. Each Web App...

There's no such thing as "unstructured data." Yes, you hear that term all the time in the database industry, and it has appeared in countless books and articles. It's all wrong. Data has meaning, and it is impossible to have meaning without structure. Some people categorize data as either relational...

A long time ago I learned a SQL Server performance guideline: User Connections should be well under 255. I think I learned that while working with SQL Server 6.5 or 7, and if it did go over 255, SQL Server would have to significantly increase the amount of memory used per connection to manage them all...

Last year about this time I set up a completely virtualized cluster (only one physical computer) using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and iSCSI via Windows Storage Server 2008 (WSS). WSS had been released a couple of days before, I had been waiting for it, and it was worth the wait. Whenever the topic...

It's common for PFE's to get involved with performance tuning issues, and for SQL Server, indexes are a critical part of maximum performance. I recently ran into a performance problem that was due entirely to the statistics being outdated on an index, so I refreshed my memory a bit about them and came...

Interesting. Project Oslo has an official name now, "SQL Server Modeling Services." It's interesting because Oslo seems strongly oriented toward developers, not SQL Server. For example, Oslo was absent from SQL PASS 2009, the leading SQL Server professional conference, which was only 3 weeks ago, and...