While visiting a customer and helping them set up AlwaysOn Availability Groups we came across a surprising "feature". On my laptop I had build a demo lab consisting of one domain controller, three Windows 2008R2 Core member servers with SQL 2012 SP1 installed...

I have not been able to follow up my post for a long time. Work has to be done as well. The good thing is that it gives me a lot of new ideas for blog posts and as a (late) resolution for the new year I will write more blog posts But back to part 4...

In part 1 showed how you could install Windows on a virtual disk and use that disk to create a new virtual machine. We improved on part 2 to show how to set the administrator password or the computer name during installation to minimize user input. ...

This post is part of a series of posts about buidling a lab environment using some of the new PowerShell cmdlets and features in Windows 8. In the previous post I explained how to create a virtual disk, apply a standard Windows Server 2008 image to...

As a Premier Field Engineer I get into a different challenge every week. These challenges can be anything; performance issues, architecture review or migration scenarios. If I'm at a customer site it is not always possible (or recommended) to test my...

In SQL Server you can use temporary tables to store intermediate results. This is a common used technique to speed up query processing. Recently I came across a problem where the temporary tables were causing the performance degradation. I'm not going...

A couple of weeks ago I got the result from my SQL 2008 MCM Lab exam and I failed. I have been working with SQL Server for almost 12 years. I have been a developer, dba and architect and last year I joined Microsoft to become a Premier Field Engineer...

With the freshly released SQL Server 2012 we can put availability groups to live. You have seen all the demo's and now you are ready to get things going in your own datacenter. At this point you might get to a few surprises. One of these might be to get...

Last week RC0 for SQL Server 2012 was released. If you missed it you can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28145 . One area where you will find improvements or changes is AlwaysOn Availability Groups. In this post I will...

One of the new features of SQL Server 2012 is AlwaysOn Availability Groups. You can think of Availability Groups as Database Mirroring on steroids. Database mirroring is only limited to one database, one secondary and if you wanted to read off it you...

Every now and then I get questions from DBA’s if I can tell why application Y needs sysadmin permissions. Or why it needs to be local admin on the SQL box, or why the database has to be named XYZ, or why no other databases are allowed on the instance...

Dinsdag 4 oktober was het weer SQL PASS tijd. Ditmaal waren we weer te gast bij IVENT en niet zoals eerder in Amsterdam maar op voormalig vliegbasis Soesterberg. De officiersmess was ook de perfecte setting voor deze avond. Ik zag bekende maar ook nieuwe...

In my opinion SQL or Windows Authentication isn’t a choice. You should always use Windows authentication unless technically impossible. The most common scenario is when the user account is not in the same domain as the SQL Instance and there is...

Denali is packed with new features. A lot of features evolve around the engine, BI, Data Quality but there are also new features added to the installation process. In a previous post I already mentioned managed service accounts and in this post I will...

As we all know we should run our SQL services with the least privileged principle. Most of the times this comes down to running with a domain account that’s not a member of any group. But we also want to use strong authentication mechanisms like Kerberos...