I sat down this afternoon after being out of town for week to work on a few things in my recently upgraded vSphere 5.1 lab and found that vCenter Server was offline. The service would not start.

Odd. It was working great when I left, and nothing changed in the… Read more

SQL Server 2012 is best known for its bombastic new features: AlwaysOn, Columnstore indexes, Window functions enhancements, Extended Events enhancements, and more.

But there are other little and less known tweaks that might seem less revolutionary, but can make our lives much easier. Below are a few of them:

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Welcome to this Friday’s reblog summary post.  The aim of these posts is to bring some old posts that newer readers may not have seen back to the forefront.  As with many technology blogs, just because a post is old, doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have value.

Some posts from… Read more

I have created facebook page named "Living For SQL Serever" couple of days back.

https://www.facebook.com/LivingForSqlServer

Inviting our community friends to like this page.

-- It's yet another facebook page that shares something about SQL server.

Personally nowadays, I am very concious in choosing topics before writing a blog post on SSC.

I am… Read more

SQL Server connectivity is the most common issue & below mention errors is also common at time of connectivity issue.

Error :

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is… Read more

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It’s that time of year where we get to vote for the three best candidates to serve a two year term on the PASS Board of Directors. It’s going to be a tough choice, there are five good candidates – all good, but certainly not interchangeable! Ballots will go out… Read more

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I’ve been working on a new presentation for full text search and brushing up on some of my T-SQL operators. Part of my talk goes into the CONTAINS operator, which is one of the full text search keywords you need to know.

This operator is only used with full text… Read more

You will hit this error Cannot assign a default value to a local variable in case you are running SQL 2005/below,and you try to declare a variable and assign it a value in one statement.

Something like  -

DECLARE @Var Varchar(15) = 'Test'

Msg 139, Level 15, State 1, Line… Read more

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In Master Data Services (MDS), I received a strange error when I was calling a stored procedure (stg.upd_name_Leaf) to batch a staging table, which will load data from the staging tables into the appropriate MDS tables:

[Execute SQL Task] Error: Executing the query “declare @versionName nvarchar(50) set @versionNam…”… Read more

“New York City…center of the universe..” – Rent

I’m off to New York this morning for the start of the 2012 SQL in the City US Tour. It kicks off tomorrow in New York City.

As this posts, I’ve just dropped my son off at school early for a… Read more

I”m working with a client in Orlando that needs a manager for their data team, seems like a prime opportunity to reach out to my network! I’ve posted the job description below with the company information removed since I’m posting it to my blog. I can tell you that it’s… Read more

The Red Gate SQL in the City US tour begins tomorrow in New York City. If you have not registered for an event in your area then hurry up as seats are limited.

The events are being held in New York, Austin, San Francisco Read more

A few weeks ago I had a customer engagement, where the customer wanted to implement Nested Partitioned Views. Before we go into the details of this approach and if it could work, I want to give you an overview about the requirements, and why the customer wanted to have Nested… Read more

A few weeks ago I had a customer engagement, where the customer wanted to implement Nested Partitioned Views. Before we go into the details of this approach and if it could work, I want to give you an overview about the requirements, and why the customer wanted to have Nested… Read more

I read yesterday that VMware has updated the “Microsoft Clustering on VMware vSphere: Guidelines for Supported Configurations” KB article linked here to include SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Failover Clusters. That’s fantastic news! I’ve known it works great for quite a while now, but it’s always nice icing on the… Read more

There are still seats left on the Learning Tree course – An Introduction to SQL Server event that I will be presenting this coming December in London. Combine some great SQL Server training with the delights of Central London in the run up to Christmas or if you prefer to… Read more