Anti-Virus Exclusions Microsoft generally recommends that servers are protected against viruses using anti-virus software. The alternative is to adequately harden and lower the software attack surface of the server, together with physical network segmentation...

Today many customers are looking at ways to consolidate their IT systems. By way of application consolidation through hardware consolidation using partitioning methodologies like LPARs, database consolidation using Named Instances, or by way of the most...

I would like to spend some time discussing one of the wonderful multi-server management features built into SQL Server that can help DBAs manage a wide and deep environment typically associated with SAP. This blog post is dedicated to discussing the Central...

Scenario Description On the Microsoft Windows application platform, SAP application servers cannot access a network resource using a simple mapped network drive. This issue is caused by the isolation between various user accounts running on the Windows...

Introduction As a SQL Server DBA, chances are that you've come across situations where you had to add/remove trace flags to your SQL Server instances. You may have wondered as to what these trace flags are used for and why do we need them anyway. I...

Morning! I just arrived home from an interesting week up in the Pacific Northwest, and wanted to share some insights. As senior architects and consultants, my colleagues and I are often looked to to provide strategic direction, or insight, or innovative...

Introduction An organization can take several precautions to help secure a database, such as designing a secure system, encrypting confidential assets, and building a firewall around the database servers. However, in a scenario where the physical media...

Hi, We raised some issues with the SAP migration tools during a replatforming project including Unicode conversion from SUN/Oracle to Windows SQL Server. Our migration went well and all the log files from the technical migration reported no error...

Wi th the year 2020 now less than a decade away, my esteemed colleague Juergen Imhoff and I have put together the following "fictional roadmap " representing upcoming technology and business themes or events. Keep in mind this blog posting in no way reflects...

I have been thinking about Business Intelligence and Business Analytics the last few weeks. In my earliest days designing and supporting BI, data marts, and data warehousing systems in the late 1990s, the work I did was aimed at something typically less...

I want to share some customer experiences with database compression we gathered in a large SAP migration project in EMEA. Most of the public available data about SAP database compression ratios only shows values for compression of an existing SQL Server...

The more I speak with executive IT leaders nowadays, the more I hear the same: help me cut costs, reduce my risks, and show quantifiable and near-immediate value to the business. What’s not being said today is more important, though – and...

One of the most important new features introduced in SQL Server 2008 was database compression (row and page). JD Edwards Business Data databases in particular are great candidates for compression. Customers can expect anything from a 55% to 80% reduction...

Are you running SQL 2008 for your SAP instance? If so, are you aware of trace flag 1117? There are a couple of best practices that are important to keep your SAP instance running well on SQL Server. The first is to ensure that proportional fill is...

In the IT community, we often talk about mission critical applications with the need to achieve high availability and have proper disaster recovery to achieve business continuity. However, it's amazing to me how many companies running SAP or other LOB...

Thinking for a Change I thought I would take a break from all of the technical blogs and write about my favorite book of all time. I am a huge John Maxwell fan. I have read nearly all of his books. In 2003, he released a book called, “Thinking...

Monitoring the Performance of Your SAP SQL Database Files The driving force behind outstanding performance with SQL Server is a technique called Proportional Fill. This is how SQL Server writes to your file groups. When running SAP on SQL, only...

Configuring Your SQL File Systems SQL Server will perform much better when the file systems are configured correctly. In this blog entry, I will show you how to validate the configuration on your database file system. In my next blog, we will look...

In the previous blog about LUN Creation and Size Expansion we talked about one of the don'ts for creating large LUNs. So the next question thrown at me is what are the alternatives to SAN concatenantion (LUSE) for volume expansion and what is the performance...

I’m looking forward to presenting at the SAP Insider IT 2011 conference March 15-18 in Las Vegas...and have been developing my presentation this week. One of my passions over the last 15 years is SAP and other LOB application Total Cost of Ownership...

Testing the performance of a particular mission-critical workload on your Line of Business application (SAP ERP or SCM, Dynamics GP, Oracle Siebel CRM, Peoplesoft HR, JDE, and so on) is part of a smart IT organization’s life. Based on your IT organization’s...

Today for an SAP installation on Windows in an existing AD domain, some user and groups requirements are mandatory from SAP. This article gives an overview of the necessary user and groups including the rights and permission. Domain or local...

I will be presenting a session at the UK Oracle Users Group JD Edwards conference on Getting the best out of SQL Server and JD Edwards. Co-presenting with me will be Terry Graham from Constellation Europe. Terry has recently upgraded CEs OneWorld ERP...

Thomas's opening blog implied that LOB wasn't just about SAP but also JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and Siebel. So where is all the JDE, PSFT and Siebel content? It is time for a change, time to slow the tidal wave that is SAP, time for Iron Man to stand upto...

Several weeks ago one of our joint customers with SAP complained about the capabilities of SQL Server and announced to migrate his SAP landscape to a competitive database platform if Microsoft wouldn’t fix “the problem”. The key issues, for which the...