A question I often get asked by customers is which edition of SQL Server do I use? I then based on the workload, high availability/disaster recovery, scalability, BI and other requirements do walk the customer down to the decision. You can also work through...

I often get asked about upgrading SQL Server 2008 Evaluation Edition to a retail edition such as Standard or Enterprise Edition. This is very well documented at the below SQL Server books online link: How to: Upgrade to a Different Edition of SQL Server...

A Principal Data Engineer at Microsoft (Saleem Hakani) had authored the below SQL Server Tips & Trick and I thought it would be one that would be found handy by many. Keep this one handy you never know when you may need it (Hopefully not too many...

Download the attached "SQL Server 2008 ScreenSaver Setup.zip", it is highly recommended for all SQL DBA's.

Below are two methods that can be used to determine the default location of data and transaction log files for your installation of SQL Server. This script can come handy when automating the deployment of databases in your environment.   Method 1...

Regardless of version of SSRS (2005 or 2008), it is not possible to combine different datasets e.g. SQL Server database dataset, SSAS cube dataset, and XML feed. Possible workaround Some ways to achieve this would be to do this in the database during...

I was recently just asked for some best practices on SSIS, and put together a collection of the below whitepapers/articles that discuss good practices for SSIS package design/development. · Top 10 SQL Server Integration Services Best Practices - http...

The below was put together by a colleague at Microsoft - Olga Liakhovich, and this information can be useful to you folks out there who may be looking for ways to find out the version of Analysis Services you are running in your environment. Solutions...

My colleague Alan Eldridge, BI Technology Specialist at Microsoft, put together a great post on incorporating Reporting Services reports in Word and PowerPoint. With his permission I am making it available to you. This post talks about incorporating the...

With SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP 2 being available, I have been playing around with one of the new features – Report Builder 3.0. One of the new features in this reporting services version is the ability to create Map based reports. Out of the box we will...

      .. SQL Server Webinar Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse for Hewlett-Packard: Technical Overview and Reference Architecture This webinar is scheduled for Wednesday, January 13, 2010 11:00 AM Eastern/8:00 AM Pacific and...

This is one of those things that you can easily get wrong from time to time, (I have ), so thought I would share it on my blog and hopefully it will save some of you from facing the same issue. When you have Reporting Services running in SharePoint integrated...

Three of the six RTM SQL Server 2008 R2 e-clinics are ready; the final three will arrive in mid-April: · Introduction to Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 Master Data Services / This two-hour clinic describes the capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 2008...

  The almost 500 page Upgrade Technical Reference guide for SQL Server 2008 R2 is available at the dedicated upgrade site . This guide not only covers upgrading from versions prior to 2008, it also covers considerations (minimal) for upgrades between...

Ever wondered whether filestream will be supported with replication? Well before I give the answer to that, let me just give you a brief background on FILESTREAM: Much of the data that is created every day is unstructured data, such as text documents...

The new Upgrade Assistant for SQL Server 2012 from our partner Scalability Experts is now available to download and use. It is a free web-downloadable tool.  It performs application compatibility testing and detects potential functional and performance...

A best practices whitepaper was recently released discussing the SQL Server 2008 Management Data Warehouse feature.   It can be accessed at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd939169.aspx

Following are links to whitepapers on SQL Server 2005 Best Practices and performance troubleshooting you and your team can utilise to assist you in finding the root cause of the application performance issues. Whitepapers & Links · Troubleshooting...

Recently I assisted my colleague answer the question of making SQL Server Developer edition act/look like Standard Edition instead of its default behaviour which is to be the same as Enterprise Edition. Basically the answer to this question is that there...

I had a question regarding automating the creation of multiple charts from one dataset, instead of having all the series being plotted on the one chart. An example of where this may be applicable if you have a dataset that has CPU usage for a number of...

Briefly, here are the new T-SQL programmability enhancements in SQL Server 2008: 1. Data Types a. New Date/time types (date, time, datetime2, datetimeoffset) b. New table types (i.e. CREATE TYPE myT AS table (a int, b varchar(100)) ) 2. SQL...

When using Filestream data in SQL Server 2008, you may come across what seems like strange behaviour. This is when you issue a DELETE statement to delete the filestream data, it doesnt actually disappear from the file system. You may ask…why is this?...

Since the release of SQL Server Denali CTP3 I have been talking more and more to customers and partners about this release and one of its great new capability called AlwaysOn. The AlwaysOn feature basically provides an easy way for DBAs to enable High...

This white paper complements the existing documentation on planning, implementation, and administration of a SQL Server 2008 failover cluster, which can be found in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Books Online. There are links to relevant existing content throughout...

Just in case you missed it!!! Microsoft Support announced an update to the SQL Server virtualisation support policy.   Guest Failover Clustering is supported for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 in a virtual machine for Windows Server 2008 with...