The installation process for SQL Server 2008 has many different options. These options allow you more control over your SQL Server Instance configuration. Having this additional control allows you to set up your SQL Server 2008 instances out of the box with the appropriate configuration, like directory structure, accounts, etc. In this article I'll walk you through the SQL Server installation process.  Read more...

Every so often I see a post in a forum or on Twitter about the use of xp_cmdshell. Usually it is someone looking for...  Read more...

The list of builds for SQL Server 2008 updated with Cumulative Update 5 for SP1 and CU8 for RTM.  Read more...

Preparation for upgrading SQL Server 2005 production database servers to SQL Server 2008, I tested upgrade in dev/test env.  Read more...

The seventh volume in this collection brings you a compilation of the best articles we've seen over the past year, from over 50 authors.   Read more...

In SQL Server 2008 one can store BLOBs (e.g. Images, video, Word, Excel, PDF, MP3, etc) in the NTFS file system rather than in a database file. This can be done by using the new FILESTREAM feature which was introduced in SQL Server 2008. In this tip we will take a look at some of the best practices which a database administrator can follow to get the best performance when using the FILESTREAM feature of SQL Server 2008.  Read more...

Welcome back to our last class this term on security in SQL Server here at SQL University. According to the syllabus,...  Read more...

This paper discusses the integration of SAP NetWeaver BI ® with Microsoft ® SQL Server ® 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS). The paper provides an overview of using the Reporting Services SAP Netweaver BI data provider and related query designer, to build high quality reports against SAP NetWeaver BI sources. For Reporting Services users who are new to working with SAP NetWeaver BI, this paper will help you connect and build datasets. For users already familiar with SAP NetWeaver, the paper will show how some of that system’s notable features can be leveraged in Reporting Services reports. It also presents some tips and tricks that can help you make the most of the integration between the two products.  Read more...

An introduction to this new feature in SQL Server 2008.  Read more...

The DBDiff utility compares two databases and generates a script to synchronize the two databases. In this article, MAK illustrates the various uses of the Open Diff utility.  Read more...

With SQL Server 2008, you will have new built-in support for location based data types and supporting geospatial features. Next you will learn how these new data types work.  Read more...

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 the paper, which is intended primarily for a technical audience. This white paper covers failover cluster architecture and concepts for Windows Server (2003 and 2008) and SQL Server 2008; installation of a SQL Server 2008 failover cluster; upgrades and updates to SQL Server 2008 failover clustering; and maintenance and administration of SQL Server 2008.  Read more...

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a new native feature in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. This article shows how to use CDC to easily set up data auditing on your SQL Server system  Read more...

The list of builds for SQL Server 2008 updated with Cumulative Update 5 for SP1 and CU8 for RTM.  Read more...

This article discusses the connectivity and usage of Teradata database servers and the .NET Framework Data Provider for Teradata with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS).  Read more...

Change data capture is a new feature in SQL Server 2008 that provides an easy way to capture changes to data in a set of database tables so these changes can be transferred to a second system like a data warehouse. This document provides guidance on how to configure change data capture parameters to maximize data capture performance while minimizing the performance impact on the production workload. The scope of this document is limited to the capture of change data and the cleanup process. Querying the changed data is out of scope for this white paper.  Read more...

SQL Server Service Broker provides support for building asynchronous messaging and queuing applications with the SQL Server Database Engine. This paper describes a large scale customer scenario and the techniques employed in scaling Service Broker to process tens of thousands of messages per second on one server.  Read more...

In this white paper we discuss two of the new features in SQL Server 2008, Star Join and Few-Outer-Row optimizations. We test the performance of SQL Server 2008 on a set of complex data warehouse queries designed to highlight the effect of these two features and observed a significant performance gain over SQL Server 2005 (without these two features).  Read more...

This paper defines a reference configuration model (known as SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse) and a CPU core-balanced approach to implementing a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP)-based SQL Server data warehouse with proven performance and scalability expectations for sequential I/O data workloads.  Read more...

Compression is one of the major features introduced in SQL Server 2008, and one that can significantly reduce disk storage. ...  Read more...

Continuing with his series on T-SQL enhancements in SQL Server 2008, Arshad Ali brings us a look at the HierarchyID and Large UDTs.  Read more...

SQL Server 2008 has a number of enhancements over 2005 that make it a more capable platform. New author Arshad Ali brings us an overview and some code about a few T-SQL changes.  Read more...

In the fourth installment that looks at T-SQL changes for SQL Server 2008, Ashad Ali examines how the Filestream data type works.  Read more...