SQL Server
Commentary and tips and tricks for the Microsoft SQL Server product
So, you are considering upgrading to SQL Server 200x from a previous version. What are some of the key issues that you need to consider, or at least be made aware of, prior to upgrading?
Fortunately the heavy lifting of answering that question has already been done for you. It's available to you in the form of an Upgrade Technical Reference Guide. There's one available for upgrading to SQL Server 2008 and one for SQL Server 2005.
SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide
SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide
Of course, you'll...
Early this morning, Bob Ward of Microsoft PSS SQL Support fame authored a post on the PSS Support blog entitled "SQL Server Support in a Hardware Virtualization Environment". As always, Bob's comments are helpful. In the post, he clarifies and elaborates on Microsoft's official position on support for a SQL Server system in a Virtualized environment.
I normally just twitter interesting links such as this, however given all of the questions and uncertainty of virtualization recently, I thought this on warranted its own blog post, too.
Here's the link - http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/10/08/sql-server-support-in-a-hardware-virtualization-environment.aspx
Cheers!
Joe
My latest Simple-Talk article is live. It's entitled Using Covering Indexes to Improve Query Performance.
Let me know what you think and if you'd like to see more articles/postings on similar topics.
Cheers!
Joe
Late last year, I posted a blog that described the undocumented sp_MSforeachtable stored procedure in Microsoft SQL Server and how it could be used to execute commands on each table within a database. The examples I gave were executing DBCC CHECKTABLE and EXECUTE sp_spaceused() for each table in a given database.
But there's another undocumented stored procedure designed for iteration. This one allows us to iterate through each database in a SQL Server instance. It's called sp_MSforeachdb.
It's usage is very similar to that of sp_MSforeachtable; simply execute the stored procedure, passing it the command that you'd like to execute as...
Fellow SQL Server enthusiast and online friend of mine, Jonathan Kehayias is very active in the MSDN Forums. He frequently provides good, insightful information to those seeking advice.
In response to a recent question in the Database Engine Forum, Jonathan provided a good example how a process marked as sleeping can still hold locks on a SQL Server resource. I'd like to share a slightly modified version of it with you; you can read his original postings here.
Let's consider a very simple table in tempdb. Use SQL Server Management Studio to execute the following query:
USE tempdb ;
GO
--create a table...
Next week at the Nashville SQL Server User Group, John Rives of Amniox is going to speak about using SQL Server with clustered virtualization. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to attend due to a prior commitment, however I have spoken with John about his presentation and it definitely sounds promising. If you're in the area, I'd encourage you to come on out. I certainly wish I could be there.
I don't have any SQL Servers in a virtualized environment. In fact, I have only worked with one company that does, and that is on a very underutilized server with...
As Geoff and Derek have already posted, SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing (RTM'd) yesterday.
Eager to get the bits? They're available from the MSDN download site.
Cheers!
Joe
Thanks to everyone who attended my SSRS class in Charlotte this week. As promised, here is a list of online resources that may prove useful to you as you work with Reporting Services.
Reporting Services Tutorials
Reporting Services Samples on Codeplex
Reporting Services Developer Info Center
Beginning SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Simple-Talk article series by Steve Joubert
Microsoft MSDN Reporting Services Forum
TechNet SQL Server TechCenter
MSBI Central
Additionally, the following...
I was searching for something online the other day and stumbled upon this TechNet article - Working with tempdb in SQL Server 2005. It's a good little article and I wanted to share it with you.
Enjoy!
Joe
I was recently perusing the the MSDN SQL Server forums and noticed a question about localization of Microsoft SQL Server messages. I replied to the post with a mention of the sys.messages table - the table where SQL Server messages are stored. I blogged about this system table a few months ago.
Afterward I started playing around some more with the sys.messages table. I started with the following basic query.
The first thing to notice is that each message_id has one or more languages associated with it. Message_id 21, for example, has a row for language_id 1033, 1031, 1036,...
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