Additional Articles

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Consolidation Best Practices

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SQLCAT

Analysis Services (SSAS)

This technical note describes the consolidation options, considerations, and best practices for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Analysis Services that the SQL CAT team has derived from working with Analysis Services customers. In this technical note, we also discuss an Analysis Services load balancer solution that one of our internal customers uses to load balance queries from Microsoft Excel® and SQL Server Reporting Services clients across multiple query servers to increase query performance and provide availability.

2010-02-24

1,994 reads

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

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MSSQLTips.com

Administration

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

Tips for Simplifying Crosstab Query Statements

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Database Journal

T-SQL

Rob Gravelle takes a complex SQL statement and shows you several ways to re-write it that both simplifies and shortens it, while still yielding the same results.

2010-02-22

4,532 reads

TSQL Challenge 24 - Find discrepancies in the scheduled activities and actual activities performed by employees

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T-SQL Challenges

T-SQL Challenges

This is a problem that I had seen in one of the forums many years back. This problem is related to a reporting requirement from the data stored by a 'poorly designed' system.

2010-02-22

1,839 reads

Code that Writes Code - A Good Idea or Not?

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Other

software development

I’m a big fan of code that writes code – most of the time. For instance, whenever you use the “templates” feature in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or the Maintenance Wizard, you’re using code that writes other code. There’s even ...

2010-02-19

2,862 reads

Corruption Recovery Tips, Database Shrinkage Advice and More

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TechNet Blogs

Backup and restore

Question: My backup strategy is a daily full backup at 1 a.m. and a log backup every hour. A DBCC CHECKDB also runs every day at 4 a.m. If I get to work at 8 a.m. and discover that the nighttime consistency checks found extensive corruption, how can I recover without losing a lot of data?

2010-02-19

2,199 reads

Striping SQL Server Database Backups

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MSSQLTips.com

Backup and restore

As databases get larger, the time for database backups to complete grows as well. Unfortunately, the time window for your backups may not increase. It could very well be the case that you reach a point where your backups will not finish in a specified amount of time.

2010-02-18

2,791 reads

Database Level Auditing with Microsoft SQL Server 2008

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Database Journal

Auditing

MAK shows us how easy it is to create a database level audit, test the audit and retrieve the audit records in Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

2010-02-17

5,905 reads

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

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MSSQLTips.com

Integration Services (SSIS)

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