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 them on their Reporting Services platform so they...

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 per instance on 32-bit systems , however in...

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 Day in Reading, UK. One thing that struck...

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 a highly available SQL Server solution. The customer...

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 general performance characteristics of a server...

Locking is a mechanism used by the Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine to synchronize access by multiple users to the same piece of data at the same time. Before a transaction acquires a dependency on the current state of a piece of data, such as by reading or modifying the data, it must protect...

SQL Server 2005 collects statistical information about indexes and column data stored in the database. These statistics are used by the SQL Server query optimizer to choose the most efficient plan for retrieving or updating data. Good statistics allow the optimizer to accurately assess the cost of different...

SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition introduced support for the use of Windows 2000 Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) to address 8GB of memory on Windows 2000 Advanced Server and 32GB of memory on Windows 2000 Datacentre. With AWE, SQL Server can reserve memory not in use by other applications and the...