SQL Feeds

Optimizing CREATE SET in Cube Calculation Scripts

tkejser — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:27:40 GMT

Author: Thomas Kejser Reviewers: Peter Adshead, Nicholas Dritsas, Sanjay Nayyar, John Desch, Kevin Cox, Akshai Mirchandani, Anne Zorner In this blog we will describe an important optimization that you should apply to cubes that are processed often and have CREATE SET commands in the calculation script. We will describe the measurements you can make to determine if this may affect you and also provide solutions that can make your cube be much more responsive to users. Background When you pr

Loading data to SQL Azure the fast way

Lubor — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:11:27 GMT

Introduction Now that you have your database set up in SQL Azure, the next step is to load your data to this database. Your data could exist in various sources; valid sources include SQL Server, Oracle, Excel, Access, flat files and others. Your data could exist in various locations. A location might be a data center, behind a corporate firewall, on a home network, or even in Windows Azure. There are various data migration tools available, such as the SQL Server BCP Utility, SQL Server In

Identifying query compile/runtime parameter values using XML SHOWPLAN output.

Peter Scharlock — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:50:51 GMT

I recently returned from Convergence 2010; the annual North American Microsoft Dynamics User Conference in Atlanta. It was a really great conference with many Customer, Partner, and Microsoft presentations and success stories. It was inspiring to see what Microsoft Dynamics products are being used for in the real world. I presented a number of sessions focused on Dynamics/SQL performance, and it became very apparent to me that XML SHOWPLAN, a highly useful feature of SQL Server, is not well unde

SQL Azure Customer Best Practices

Michael Thomassy — Fri, 28 May 2010 04:46:00 GMT

The SQLCAT team and the SQL Azure team have been working closely together with a number of customers even before we launched our CTP (Community Technology Preview) in November, 2009 at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference). After our production release in January, 2010, we’ve continued working with some interesting customers and have captured a number of great learnings in these best practice documents. We’ve posted 6 best practice documents to the SQL Azure d

Just added - NEW SQL Immersion Event in Bellevue, WA - in August

kimberly.nospam@nospam.sqlskills.com (kltripp) — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:59:00 GMT

It's official! We're doing another 5-day SQL Immersion Event (our ever-popular 5-day Deep Dive into Internals, Performance and Maintenance) this year in the US! We decided to have a class near Seattle because Washington is *fabulous* in August! The class will cover our best content in these areas: On-disk structures: how the data is stored Index internals: how the data is organized Logging and recovery: how the data is protected Choosing the RIGHT Data Ty

Full-text query in local languages

Kun Cheng — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:46:00 GMT

Author: Kun ChengReviewer: Alexei Khalyako Last week, I was presented with an interesting Full-text search problem, which I like to share with you, especially the ones who need to support international markets with SQL Server Full-text solution. The issue was that the customer application not able to find target strings as part of their routine test cycle. Note this customer is planning to enter Asia market with support of local languages. The unit test of Chinese language failed because of the

CurCmd in TDS DONE token

SQL Protocols — Wed, 19 May 2010 06:20:00 GMT

Several customers approached us asking what are the possible values for CurCmd in TDS DONE token. The TDS DONE token is defined at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd340421(PROT.13).aspx. Similar rules apply to DONEPROC and DONEINPROC. In the TDS protocol, we have: CurCmd The token of the current command. The token value is provided and controlled by the application layer, which utilizes TDS. The TDS layer does not evaluate the value. As it says, we don’t put the possible value in

A new and improved sp_helpindex (jokingly sp_helpindex8)

kimberly.nospam@nospam.sqlskills.com (kltripp) — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:33:00 GMT

OK, I first blogged about re-writing sp_helpindex here as sp_helpindex2 (April 2008). Shortly thereafter (Aug 2008), a reader found a bug and when I went digging, so did I (a couple of others). I did a few tweaks and the version that's stuck for the past couple of years is in this blog post: Updates (fixes) to sp_helpindex2. However, as much as I've used that - I've always been frustrated by its output. And, so, over the months+, I wrote sp_helpindex3 (this solely added the index

TDS traceflags in SQL Server

SQL Protocols — Tue, 18 May 2010 06:40:00 GMT

Microsoft SQL Server has a traceflag framework through which users can set specific server characteristics or to switch on/off a particular behavior. For details about how to use traceflags, please refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188396.aspx In this blog, I will introduce two useful traceflags related to TDS, -T4052/-T4055.-T4052 can be used to print the TDS packet sent to client (i.e. output) to console.-T4055 can be used to print the TDS packet received (i.e. input) to conso

Determining the position of search arguments in a join

kimberly.nospam@nospam.sqlskills.com (kltripp) — Sun, 16 May 2010 21:17:00 GMT

As a follow-on discussion to my SQL Server Magazine Q&A titled “Determining the position of search arguments in a join” where I was responding to a reader question about whether or not search arguments could be moved up into the FROM clause instead of placed in the WHERE clause and whether or not it would improve performance. While I was so focused on creating a scenario to highlight the problems when doing this, I missed a great point about what happened in my specific exa