A big headache in SSAS, especially when dealing with a large cube, is making a change that when deployed, causes a cube to become unprocessed, forcing you to do a full process so the cube is usable.  Nothing is worse than making a change without realizing it will cause the… Read more

I’m happy to say that for most of you out there, the answer to this question is “no.” That’s as it should be. I’m not anyone all that special. I present technical sessions at various events from local user group meetings to SQL Saturday’s to international events like the PASS… Read more

Many of you may now or in the future have the need to upgrade your SSIS packages to the new SQL Server 2012 SSIS.  Luckily, upgrading from SSIS 2005 or 2008 isn’t nearly as painful as you may have experienced upgrading old DTS (SQL Server 2000) packages.  If you’re considering… Read more

Denali – Day 16: Tool: Database Recovery Advisor –SSMS tool

As blogged on “Denali – Day 11: SSMS enhancement” about Features added on SSMS, now you can restore a page using SSMS, to add to it SSMS has another tool called “Recovery Adviser” where you could restore database… Read more

I was helping out a user on the forums the other day where they were asking questions about shredding an xml structure of which they didn’t know the schema for. They wanted to know the best way about writing a generic function to shred any xml to a flat table.… Read more

Over the past several months, Dell has been rolling out a number of new 12th generation servers that all use the new 32nm Intel Xeon E5 series processor (aka Sandy Bridge-EP). These new servers all have much higher memory density and more PCI-E slots (which are also PCI-E 3.0) compared… Read more

SQL Rally 2012 Recap and Session Files

SQL Rally 2012 was hosted by the North Texas SQL Server User Group. More tha anything, it was nice to be back in the area where I grew up. I was born in Houston, but I grew up in… Read more

When ad hoc queries are executed in sql server, if it is executed without parameters, and it is simple,  SQL Server parameterizes the query internally to increase the possibility of matching it against an existing execution plan, that's called "Simple Parameterization"

For instance:

--clear plan cache first
DBCC FREEPROCCACHE

--run…

Read more

Session Files from SQL Saturday #107 Houston

SQL Saturday Houston was a great event hosted by the Houston Area SQL Server Users Group. The event did not have a very large attendence, but those who traded in a beautiful Saturday for some free training were very engaged… Read more

I was fortunate enough to get to present not 1 but 2 sessions at SQLRally 2012 in Dallas last week.  As a core organizer of the event, this really made it a special week to present twice and see it all come together.  My first session was a community choice… Read more

Cloud computing doesn’t seem to have any great definition. Like the physical structures is is named for, it is amorphous, with no defined boundaries, and often, without a recognizable shape. There are even a whole host of different acronyms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), which attempt to provide… Read more

Denali – Day 15: Support for Windows Server Core

 

Windows Server Core: Microsoft Server has so many features which is not required on the server and would never been used, but it exists and sometime cause issue. For this reason Microsoft has introduced an operating system called “CORE” from “windows… Read more

I’m working on a more comprehensive review of last week’s SQL Rally event, but I’d like to go ahead and share my slide deck and photos from the event.

For those who attended my Data Quality Services session on Thursday, thanks so much for coming.  I had 100 or so… Read more

There was a great deal of feedback to my previous post One Way To Insert Many Rows Very Fast From Your .NET Application.

The post focused on the performance benefit of using a single SQL statement with an XML-based parameter to do inserts of many rows to a table… Read more

If you are using SQL Server 2008 enterprise/datacenter edition, or SQL Server 2008 R2 standard or above, you are in the lucky possition to be able to compress your SQL Server backups. Often I see installations of these versions, where compression is not enabled. Let me show you a couple… Read more

I was just at SQLRally in Dallas, and I was speaking to a DBA friend of mine over lunch. He made the comment that his manager thought he spent too much time at work taking care of the organization’s data. He told me that he spent so much time at… Read more

Once you’ve enabled filestream, the next step is to add a filegroup to your database to hold the filestream data. This is pretty easy to do, and I’ll show you the SSMS and code versions.

If you want to know more about these Filestream containers, you can read BOL Read more

Much Learning Was Had By All

SQL Rally 2012 had a diverse group of speakers and something for all levels of experience. I personally dug the talk Suresh did on 2012 memory internals. Mike Fal(twitter|blog) was the SQL Rally swan song. He is an example… Read more

I see a lot of confusion on what exactly is the difference between a data warehouse and a data mart.  The best definition that I have heard of a data warehouse is:

“A relational database schema which stores historical data and metadata from an operational system or systems, in… Read more

To check SQL Server Agent Job History you can use the Log File Viewer from SQL Server Management Studio.

To Open Log File Viewer,

1. Expand Server Node > 2. Expand SQL Server Agent > 3. Expand Jobs > 4. Right click on the Job and 5. Select "View History"… Read more