This is something that is totally overlooked, in my experience, with SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012. On the contrary to what happens with SQL Server 2008, the Standard version of SQL Server 2008R2 & SQL Server 2012 supports backup compression: SQL Server 2008 R2 BOL ...

In the last days I  had to work quite a lot with extended events in order to deeply monitor SQL Server performance. One interesting request that came out while implementing the monitoring infrastructure, was the possibility to monitor the performance of a set of stored procedures, vital for the correct handling of an online booking ...

One very useful usage of Extended Events is the ability to trap SQL Server error without the need to have a server trace running (which, btw, is deprecated), with the additional feature of being able to query the data as soon as it comes in. This means that we a solution to monitor and trap errors as soon as they happen can be easily created, in ...

Today I was using a 3rd Party Data Flow component that has several Custom Properties for which I need to change some of their values at runtime using a DTS Expression. To mimic the situation let’s use the “Percentage Sampling” that has two Custom Properties: Of the two Custom Properties only some (one in this case) are available also outside ...

In the last days I needed a quick and efficient way to monitor the performance of a job and of each step over time. There’s a lot of interesting data in MSDB database and the various sysjob tables, but the stored data is not really easy to use outside the Management Studio. Date and Time are not stored as date/time data type, there is no easy way ...

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be delivering a Pre-Conference at PASS Summit 2012. I’ll speak about Business Intelligence again (as I did in 2010) but this time I’ll focus only on Data Warehouse, since it’s big topic even alone. I’ll discuss not only what is a Data Warehouse, how it can be modeled and built, but also how it’s development ...

From time to time happens that I need to extract metadata informations from Analysis Services DMVS in order to quickly get an overview of the entire situation and/or drill down to detail level. As a memo I post the link I use most when need to get documentation on SSAS Objects Data DMVs: SSAS: Using DMV Queries to get Cube Metadata ...

If you’re using MDS and DQS with the Excel Integration you may get an error when trying to use the “Match Data” feature that uses DQS in order to help to identify duplicate data in your data set. The error is quite obscure and you have to enable WCF error reporting in order to have the error details and you’ll discover that they are related to ...

While preparing my slides e demos for the forthcoming SQL Server Conference 2012 in Italy, I’ve come across a nice addition to DTS Expression language which I never noticed before and that seems unknown also to the blogosphere: REPLACENULL. REPLACENULL is the same of ISNULL in T-SQL. It’s *very* useful especially when loading a fact table of your ...

SQL Server 2012 is available for download! http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/default.aspx The Evaluation version is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29066 and along with the SQL Server 2012 RTM there’s also the Feature Pack available: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29065 The ...