There are plenty of occasions when it makes a lot of sense to do backup and restore scripts in PowerShell. Microsoft have put effort into making it much easier, as Allen White demonstrates.  Read more...

This document evaluates the latest functionality provided by Microsoft SQL Server 2012 With Power View for Multidimensional Models[1], this SQL Server 2012 CTP release allows connections between Power View and Multidimensional Models ( cubes) and not just Tabular Models.  Read more...

SQL Server 2012 makes your database maintenance jobs easy by proving an effective Maintenance Plan Wizard. This wizard does a fair job of creating core maintenance plans for your database.  Read more...

Marcin Policht explores some of PowerShell's SSIS-specific automation capabilities by demonstrating the process of configuring an already deployed package in order to carry out a parameterized package execution.  Read more...

Are many people upgrading to SQL Server 2012? Is it worth the cost for your company for any existing instances? Steve Jones asks the question this week.  Read more...

A list of the builds of SQL Server 2012 through CU#4.  Read more...

With SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups, you can configure read-only routing and to automatically redirect the read-only workloads to a secondary replica after a failover. Can this be done using Windows PowerShell?  Read more...

Overview of 2 very important clauses added to SELECT statement in SQL2012 to allow paging on result sets.  Read more...

The new SQL Server 2012 Sequence Object can be used to generate unique numbers that can be automatically incremented based on an increment value. Greg Larsen discusses the different features of the sequence object and how you can use it to generate sequence numbers.  Read more...

For some time, Microsoft had a few window functions, but not the full set specified in the SQL 2003 standard. Now, in SQL Server 2012 we have the whole range, and extremely useful they are too. There's no longer an excuse to avoid them, particularly now you have Rob Sheldon's gentle introduction.  Read more...

You have the option of using PowerShell when automating management of SQL Server 2012 Integration Services. While this functionality is not as straightforward as those accustomed to traditional PowerShell cmdlets might expect, the steps required to accomplish the most common SSIS administrative tasks follow a relatively consistent pattern.  Read more...

Extended Events provide a way of unintrusively monitoring what's going on in a SQL Server instance. Unlike SQL Server Profiler and SQL Trace, it has little performance impact. Now, in SQL Server 2012 SSMS, it is relatively easy to use, as Robert Sheldon shows.  Read more...

Dynamically initialise FTP connection using expressions and retrieve files stored in multiple FTP directories using SQL Server Data Tools  Read more...

SQL Server 2012 delivers enhancements to the Resource Governor that reflect a growing need for centrally managed database services to provide multitenancy to customers who require isolated workloads. This document describes the enhancements and why they were added. It includes a self-contained walk through that you can try in order to gain familiarity with the new features.  Read more...

Greg Larsen explores the new SQL Server 2012 date and time functions and shows you how to exploit these functions in new application code.  Read more...

A list of the builds of SQL Server 2012 through CU#4.  Read more...

There are several different ways of restricting access to SSIS packages and confidential information they contain. However, preventing unauthorized users from running or viewing the content of your code is not the only security measure that you should take into consideration.   Read more...

The error handling of SQL Server has always been somewhat mysterious. Now at last, the THROW statement has been included in SQL Server 2012 that, when combined with the TRY...CATCH block, makes error handling far easier. Robert Sheldon explains all.  Read more...

My organization is looking at SQL Server 2012 and I know that the ability to create roles at the server level is a new feature. Since this is new and impacts security, how do I handle them and how do I audit them?  Read more...

SQL Server Failover Clustering, which includes support for both local and multisite failover configurations, is part of the SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn implementation suite, designed to provide high availability and disaster recovery for SQL Server. The multisite failover clustering technology has been enhanced significantly in SQL Server 2012. The multisite failover cluster architecture, enhancements in SQL Server 2012 to the technology, and some best practices to help with deployment of the technology are the primary focus of this paper.  Read more...