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SQL Server Lazy Writer Issue: Warning, No Free Buffers Found

This tip is intended to help someone who is or will be facing a no free buffer found issue with the SQL Server LazyWriter. Recently, we experienced some unknown issues with our SQL Server and after inspecting the error log file we noticed the following errors: "SQL Server has encountered 50 occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file..." and "LazyWriter: warning, no free buffers found." These error messages were followed by a SQL Server memory dump file like SQLDump0030.mdmp in the file system.

2010-02-23

2,484 reads

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Use SSIS to import one cell of an Excel file into SQL Server

Recently I needed to find a method to import one cell of an Excel sheet into SQL Server 2005 using a scheduled job on a 64 bit clustered environment. For example, I have a monthly sales report listing sales per product category, such as Books, Magazines, DVDs, etc. I only want to import the Total Sales amount into SQL Server and this number is located in an Excel file "sales.xls.sheet1.cell.B5". I used to use OPENROWSET to solve the problem, however OPENROWSET requires Microsoft Jet OLE DB Provider which is not available in 64 bit. In this tip I am going to talk about how to use SSIS to accomplish this task easily.

2010-02-15

4,402 reads

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Configure Windows Firewall to Work with SQL Server

Windows Firewall is an OS level software firewall. It can be a crucial part of OS level security if you are not using other firewall hardware or software. Since I do not have another firewall I have a need to enable Windows Firewall for my SQL Server database server. In this article I go through the process of configuring Windows Firewall for different scenarios along with the associated considerations.

2010-02-11

4,068 reads

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Question of the Day

The Large Encoded Value

I want to use the new BASE64_ENCODE() function in SQL Server 2025, but return a string that isn't large type. What is the longest varbinary string I can pass in and still get a varchar(8000) returned?

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