Recently, I’ve helped several customers with Kerberos authentication problems with Reporting Services and Analysis Services, so I’ve decided to write this blog post and pull together some useful resources in one place (there are 2 whitepapers...

I blogged a while back about modifying the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard reports to run on SQL Server 2008 . I’ve since been working with several customers who use these reports for performance troubleshooting, but who would like to host...

Thanks to all who attended the SSUG meeting in Edinburgh last night. I've included my slides and demo scripts in the attached file (SSUG_190810_ExecutionPlans.zip). I've also included some additional references relating to discussions we had during the...

The next Scottish SQL Server User Group meeting will take place on Thursday 19th August at the Microsoft offices in Edinburgh. I'll be talking about SQL Server execution plans and how to use them to identify issues in your application code and Martin...

I recently came across some issues running perfmon on Windows Server 2003 where the OS is 64-bit and SQL Server is 32-bit (Wow64). The SQL Performance counters were not appearing as the default Perfmon is 64-bit, which is unable to read the 32-bit SQL...

I had a great time at SQLBits VI last week and would like to thank everyone for coming along to my session :-) I've attached the slides from the session "SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Scalability and Performance" for you to download. Cheers !

I am very happy to announce that I've been chosen as a speaker for the SQLBits VI conference in London on the 16th April. The theme for this conference is performance and scalability and I'll be talking about some of the new features in SQL Server Reporting...

The next Scottish SQL Server User Group meeting will take place in the Microsoft Edinburgh office on Thursday the 25th February. Quest Software’s Iain Kick will be talking about performance troubleshooting and Alistair Board and Martin Bell will be talking...

This is a question I get asked a lot by customers (last week being the latest) and the answer really depends on which platform you are running on. There is a support policy in Books Online that states that we only support a maximum of 10 mirrored databases...

I’ve been fairly quiet on the blogging-front recently, but I have been busy working with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) ! I've also been fortunate enough to present a session to customers on SSRS scalability at a recent Business Intelligence Operations...

I have the great pleasure of speaking at the next Scottish SQL Server User Group meeting being held in Mocrosoft's Edinburgh ofice on Thursday the 8th of October. Full details can be found on the UK User Group site . My talk will focus on some of the...

A new whitepaper covering the topic of performance troubleshooting in SQL Server 2008 has now been released. You can download the paper from the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd672789.aspx

I was working recently with a customer who was looking to deploy a SQL Server 2005 cluster across 2 geographically dispersed sites using Windows Server 2008. They were looking to utilise the new clustering improvements in Windows Server 2008 to build...

During a recent visit to Seattle for a Microsoft conference, I learned from my colleague Michael Thomassy that it's possible to run the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard reports on SQL Server 2008, with a slight modification. There is a great new...

I have uploaded my slides from my Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 session at the recent Scottish SQL Server User Group meeting held in Edinburgh on the 29th January. It was good to see a number of new faces at the meeting, and if you fancy coming along in...

On January 19, 2009 Microsoft shipped the Third Cumulative Update for SQL Server 2008 RTM. This CU represents 36 Resolved Issues and 30 Unique Customer Requests. More details and download details can be found here: http://support.microsoft...

The SQL Server 2008 Technical Reference Guide has just been released, covering the essential steps and best practices to upgrade existing 2000 and 2005 instances to 2008. There is also a list of other upgrade resources available at http://msdn.microsoft...

Cumulative Update package 2 has now been released for SQL Server 2008. See the following KB article for full details: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958186/en-us

I'm happy to announce that the next Scottish SQL Server User Group will be hosted at Microsoft Edinburgh on the evening of the 13th November. Full details of the agenda and how to register can be found on the UK SQL Server User Group site here: http...

Had a weird problem with Virtual PC 2007 where the blue screen would flash up when I ran the program, yet the console window would not appear even though Virtual PC was running in the task manager and the system tray. The Virtual PC console had effectively...

I've been looking at this new feature of SQL Server 2008 in order to demo it to customers, and I have to say it's pretty cool ! Along with Resource Governor and compression, it's one of my favourite new features and a good reason to consider an upgrade...

I attended a SQL Server User Group meeting earlier this year and heard a presentation about favourite DMV's. Mentioned in the discussion was sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats and that got me thinking about indexing strategies. I have been involved in performance...

I've had one or two requests recently to set up the Performance Dashboard reports on SQL Server so I've created this blog post to step through the process. Firstly, the Performance Dashboard was created to allow customers and support engineers to monitor...

The release of SQL Server 2008 has hit another milestone with the news that Release Candidate 0 (RC0) has been made available for public download this morning. This was initially released to Technet Plus and MSDN subscribers last Friday. It is expected...

A great set of SQL Server automation tools has just been released by Microsoft onto the SQL Server Community Worldwide site... http://sqlcommunity.com/ScriptsTools/OpsDBOperationsDatabaseforSQLServer/tabid/275/language/en-US/Default.aspx These are...