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Latest Blog Posts
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I've been working on a team with Roger Doherty building parts of what's now become the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book . So, if you work on the bleeding edge of SQL Server and are keen to get your head around what's coming, this is a seriously...
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To ensure atomicity of transactions, we can use XACT_ABORT ON or wrap the transaction in TRY block and rollback in CATCH block. In some cases, the XACT_ABORT ON approach uses noticeably less CPU. I am posting repro scripts. Please run them, tweak them,...
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Wrapping related changes in a transaction is a good way to ensure data integrity. Besides, in some cases it just runs noticeably faster, using less CPU. As usual, I am posting repro scripts, which you can run, tweak, and see for yourself. Environment...
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I’ve released couple of hours ago the SP2 of my DTLoggedExec tool. For those who don’t know it, it’s a DTEXEC replacement, useful to execute SSIS and having logging provided right from the engine and not from the package itself. More info can be found...
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I will be delivering another free, online MicroTraining on SSIS Package Configurations Tuesday, 7 Feb 2012, at 10:00 AM EST. Join Andy Leonard as he demonstrates uses of SSIS Package Configurations for externalizing SSIS package variable values. Register...
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These days if you get a new server-class machine to run SQL Server, you can almost be 100% sure that it’ll be running on NUMA hardware. The recent AMD Opteron and Intel Nehalem-based processors are all built on some form of NUMA architecture. The current...
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This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here . The book I chose for January 2012 was: The Elements of Persuasion by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman...
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My 4yo son keeps asking me why I should leave home so often to attend SQL conferences around the world and today, after a couple of days of snow, he discovered a good reason, along with the best place for the SQLBits scarf....
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Once upon a time I blogged at http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamiethomson but that ended in August 2009 when I left EMC. There is a lot of (arguably) valuable content over there however certain events in the past leave me concerned that that content is...
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What happens when NUMA affinity meets query parallelism? It gets no respect! SQL Server allows you to affinitize a TCP port to a specific NUMA node or a group of NUMA nodes. Books Online has an article on How to: Map TCP/IP ports to NUMA Nodes . And this...
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I know people have been doing all sorts of things with T-SQL, and I have absolutely no issue with people trying to push the limit of what T-SQL can do, or what you can use it to accomplish, especially when it’s for demonstration or pedagogical purposes,...
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I see a lot of people suggest while loops instead of cursors in situations where row-based processing is required (or, at least, where folks think that row-based processing is required). Sometimes the justification is that constructing a while loop is...
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When you create a PowerPivot workbook or a BISM Tabular model (new in Analysis Services 2012), you store data by using the VertiPaq engine, which is an in-memory columnar database. Instead of considering the row of a table as the main unit of storage,...
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Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development practise that has been around for a few years. Wikipedia describes it as: Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development...
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Be careful: unlike most other languages, T-SQL does not limit variables' scope to the block where the variable has been defined. For example, the following snippet compiles and runs: -- @to is not in scope yet -- the line below would not compile --SET...
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A new personal blog post: Discerning Between Noisy and Important...
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In April 2010 Twitter announced a new feature that they would soon be introducing - Twitter Annotations. Put simply Twitter Annotations can be described as the ability to attach metadata to a tweet; think hashtags on steroids. Lots of people were quite...
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We are told that SQL Server 2008 R2 Audit (and SQL Server 2008 Audit) has much less performance overhead than SQL Trace when we try to capture the same information. Knowing how SQL Server R2 Audit is implemented (i.e. on top of the extended events infrastructure),...
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I recently joined a software development project that involves not only myself and other internal Microsoft employees, but a partner and a customer as well. We are building a hybrid solution that uses assets on premises as well as Windows Azure for processing....
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I see a lot of people getting really excited. There is a "virtual launch event" for SQL Server 2012 being held on March 7, 2012. You can read more about the event at http://sqlserverlaunch.com/ . Let me throw out a dose of reality: if you are not on a...
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This one is quite subjective, and I'm sure I will face plenty of opposition - not only because it's a preference thing and many people are married to their preferences, but also because it violates the strict interpretation of the standard. Personally,...
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If you have Chinese friends, it's time to say 新年快乐 to them! (Xīnnián kuàilè -> Pronounced like Shin Nien Kwai Ler) They are welcoming in the year of the dragon....
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I am honored to present Building Your First SSIS 2012 Package to the Madison Professional Association for SQL Server (MADPass) Wednesday, 25 Jan 2012! If you read this blog and will be in the Madison, Wisconsin area Wednesday, stop by and introduce yourself!...
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Recently, I have been looking into the performance impact of enabling hyperthreading on various platforms with various SQL Server workloads. All the results I have shared so far are from a DL580 G7 with four Westmere-EX (E7-4870) processors. Overall,...
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Is your SQL Server running slower than you’d like? Is it your SQL Server configuration or your slightly old hardware? We need to use tools to gather information. My subjective impression is that my 2.2 GHz laptop outperforms my 3.0 GHz overclocked desktop...
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