The free software tool nLite can be used to customize an XP installation. It isn’t supported by Microsoft, but neither is XP. It is possible to remove Internet Explorer or networking components from an installation. Sometimes there is no need for the XP machine to ever connect to a network. This is particularly true when XP is used to host ...

Microsoft has released a free ebook on Azure HDInsight. Full details are available here. HDInsight is Microsoft’s implementation of Hadoop. Azure HDInsight is Hadoop in the cloud. The ebook gives you a quick overview of what Big Data is and what you can do with it.

If you primarily work in desktop mode, you can easily reconfigure Windows 8 to start in desktop mode when booting up. Once in desktop mode, go to the Taskbar, right-click and then select Properties to change the Navigation on your machine. Figure 1. Right-click on the Taskbar select Properties. On the Navigation tab, check When I sign in or ...

Having a computer wake up when you don’t want it to wastes electricity and drains the battery on mobile devices. My desktop had been waking up at night, so I assumed it was some network traffic on my home network. I unchecked Allow this device to wake the computer on my network adapters. Figure 1. Network adapter Power Management tab. That ...

One of my coworkers told me about Mockaroo, a web-based data generator. I needed some test data for upcoming blog posts, so I decided to give it a try. It’s pretty good. I had to use Firefox because of problems running Mockaroo on Internet Explorer 11. Using the defaults except for changing the format to SQL, it generated output that looked ...

Many people visiting the SQL Server booth wanted to know how to improve performance. With so much attention being given to COLUMNSTORE and in-memory tables and stored procedures, it is easy to overlook how important tempdb is to performance. Speeding up tempdb I/O improves performance. The best way to do this is to not do the I/O in the first ...

There is some confusion about durability of data stored in SQL Server in-memory tables, so some review of the concepts is appropriate. The in-memory option is enabled at the database level. Enabling it at the database level only gives you the option to specify the in-memory feature on a table by table basis. No existing tables or new tables will ...

Today people asked me about backing up older versions of SQL Server to Azure. Older versions back to SQL Server 2005 can be easily backed up to Azure Storage by installing Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool. It installs a service of the same name that applies rules to SQL Server backups. You can tell the tool to backup or encrypt ...

Today at TechEd 2014, many people had questions about the in-memory database features in SQL Server 2014. A common question is how an in-memory database is different from having a database on a SQL Server with an amount of ram far greater than the size of the database. In-memory or memory optimized tables have different data structures and are ...

Microsoft’s TechEd 2014 conference opened today. It doesn’t fully open until tomorrow, but was open for doing hands on labs and other side activities. The labs provide you with a convenient, guided tour of new features. To make the best use of your time, I recommend reading the instructions carefully and thoughtfully. Try to understand why and ...