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Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, gives us a quick peek at System Center Advisor (SCA), a freely available cloud-based service from Microsoft that enables you to assess your server configurations and proactively avoid problems. As you probably know by...

Summary : Tony O'Grady , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in the UK, continues with his second post of 5 advanced articles on charting statistical data with SQL Server. In this post he explores how changes to the underlying data are reflected in cardinality estimations, explores some scenarios...

Summary : Piotr Gardy , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Poland, provides us with recommendations on why (and how) a ConfigMgr database should be hosted on its own dedicated SQL Server instance. For more useful tidbits, please check out Piotr’s Polish language TechNet blog . ...

Summary : Tony O'Grady , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in the UK, helps us understand whether or not a SQL dataset is going to produce useful query statistics by looking for patterns in histogram values in comparison to actual values. He introduces SQL Server histograms and explains how SQL...

Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE) based in Germany, walks us through how you can activate the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8 when you don’t have access to the Internet. Enjoy! I had to install SQL Server 2012 on my lab computer today. For those of you who...

  SQL Server 2008 and above provide an amazing diagnostics capability in the form of the System Health extended events session. However, not everyone knows about it – part of the reasons being that there is not a convenient way to visualize the data collected therein. Our colleagues at the SQL Server...

Krishna Golla has a grab-bag of SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn FAQs suitable for DBAs and Infrastructure types, covering everything from the hotfixes recommended for AlwaysOn, to whether Availability Groups can be defined outside a domain boundary. For example, in the Failover Scenarios section: 1. What happens...

Our colleagues in Korea are always at the leading edge of technology. My friend Ji Yong Seong from the PFE Korea team has created a wonderful blog post on a new feature in SQL 2012 SP1 CU2 which enables backup / restore of databases to and from Windows Azure blob storage. Great stuff! Posted by Arvind...

Our very own editor-at-large by night and Microsoft Principal Premier Field Engineer by day (and night as well!) Arvind Shyamsundar takes us on a tour of some of the top issues detected across Microsoft’s broad customer base by the Microsoft Premier Support SQL Server Risk Assessment Program (a...

Hello everyone, my name is Yong Rhee and I’m a Premier Field Engineer.  In this post, I’m excited to discuss a new Premier Support offering called Risk Assessment Program (RAP) as a Service ( or RaaS for short ). For those that are not familiar with RAP, it is a Microsoft Services Premier Support...

Pedro Azevedo Lopes shares his prescription for a better-looking SQL Server in his post About Maintenance Plans – grooming SQL Server : I admit I’m not a big fan of Maintenance Plans (the feature that goes by that name) mainly because of its “do or die” approach. So, it was not by chance that I wrote...

Written by Mohit Gupta, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Every now and then we have deadlocks taking place in SQL Server.  Most go unnoticed, either because the frontend application handles it gracefully.  Or no error is not reported out to the user. What is a Deadlock? Deadlocks happen when...

Written by Mohit Gupta, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. In my last post I talked about how to get the list connections (e.g. who is connected and requests are they running on SQL Server). I talked about how to use dm_exec_connections, dm_exec_sessions and dm_exec_requests, we saw how powerful...

Written by Chris Tao, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. In my last article , we discussed the nature of metadata, the need for metadata management in the modern enterprise, and some fundamental information about Project Barcelona. In this article, we will go through the Project Barcelona product UI ...

  Written by Mohit Gupta, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. I am asked this question by Microsoft SQL Server customers again and again: “What dynamic management views ( DMV ) or dynamic management functions ( DMF ) should I use?” The short answer is, as many as you need. The detailed answer is,...

Written by Chris Tao, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Have you ever been asked the following questions when passing through the immigration counter to enter a foreign country? Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going to? What are you doing here? Most people can usually answer these questions...

Written by Mohit Gupta, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. I was thinking of writing an article about Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL Basics; however, in order to do the examples and demos I wanted to use a database that’s readily available on the Internet, so I decided to use the common AdventureWorks...

Written by boB Taylor , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Now Available! A smaller, leaner database.  I have released my SQL Server Compression Estimator tool to CodePlex . One of the most exciting additions to SQL Server 2008 was the capability to apply data compression. The benefits...

Written by boB Taylor , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. As the world moves to a global economy, it becomes more and more important to capture time information with respect to Coordinated Universal Time ( UTC ). This format captures the date and time along with a time zone offset (offset...

Written by boB Taylor , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. The wait is finally over!  The SQLDiag Configuration Tool has been released. One of the most heavily used tools in the SQL Server Premier Field Engineer’s tool belt is PSSDiag . It is maintained by Microsoft’s Customer Service and...

Written by boB Taylor , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Many Microsoft SQL Server DBAs automate as many of their day to day processes as possible, freeing them to attend to higher impact activities. To do so, many DBAs leveraged two undocumented system stored procedures, namely sp_MSForEachDatabase...

Written by Sadeesh Poovalur, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, based in Canada. To achieve a smooth and seamless transition when upgrading versions of your SQL Server database(s), appropriate planning is required or you risk having unhappy users and/or malfunctioning database applications. There...