At the end of my Denali presentation at SQL Saturday #65 in Vancouver, a member of the audience asked, ''What makes a columnstore index different from a regular nonclustered index?'' At the end of a busy day, I was at a loss for an answer, and I'll explain why. First, I'll briefly explain the basic, core, high-level functionality of a columnstore ...

There are posts elsewhere that go through the whole rigamarole (for example, this post from Don Gill, SQL Server's Group Content Publishing Manager).  I just wanted to highlight the key bullet points: if you want to use Books Online locally, you will need to: install Books Online from Denali setup. Note that Management Studio is now ...

If you come across a SQL Server that is not running, it can be troublesome to determine what happened and when.  You can run through the Windows event viewer, but this can be a real needle in a haystack problem on busy servers, especially if there are a lot of instances.  Wouldn't it be great to be able to easily read the SQL Server ...