In this article, you are going to learn about SQL Server 2016 express download and installation process. The SQL Server 2016 express edition is a free version of SQL Server that offers limited features. The express edition of SQL Server can be used in any of the following scenarios:
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In this article, I am going to explain how we can install and configure the iSCSI Target Server Role on Windows Server 2016. iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer System Interface and iSCSI Target Server allows you to boot multiple computers from a single operating system (OS) image.
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This article serves as a SQL Server Download guide for both beginners and beyond. Some years ago, it was pretty simple to download the installer because you had all the components installed. Now, it is harder because you need to install several components, there are several versions and editions. This guide will help you to understand which version and edition needs to be downloaded.
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I’ve always been in favor of an orthodox strategy when it comes to applying SQL Server updates which often goes like:
In this post, we will continue to look at the cardinality estimation changes in SQL Server 2016. This time we will talk about scalar UDF estimation. Scalar UDFs (sUDF) in SQL Server have quite bad performance and I encourage you try to avoid them in general, however, a lot of systems still use them.
I’ll use Microsoft sample DB AdventureworksDW2016CTP3 and write the following simple scalar function, it always returns 1, regardless of the input parameter. I run my queries against Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (SP1) (KB3182545) – 13.0.4001.0 (X64)
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Every DBA, even a beginner, may walk through the SQL Server backup screen multiple times per day. It is mandatory that you know every single detail of every single option you have in the most repeatable task you could do as a DBA.
In this article, I will be discussing every option available in full backup screen of SQL Server 2016.
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In the first part of this article, we will discuss about parallelism in the SQL Server Engine. Parallel processing is, simply put, dividing a big task into multiple processors. This model is meant to reduce processing time.
Execution plans are the equivalent to highways and traffic signs of T-SQL queries. They tell us how a query is executed.
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In an era of remote storage and retrieval of data, including the cloud, data security plays a vital role, especially since it’s vulnerable during the transit. Situations like database backup or copy from or to the cloud, there is always a risk of data exposure to outside world lurking around one corner or the other. We have seen a noticeable surge in the technologies around protection and security of data from the world full of unsafe hands. Efforts are being made to protect data at a very granular level of the encryption hierarchy. Protection of business data cannot be stressed upon more.
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SQL Server Maintenance Plans is a SQL Server Management Studio built-in feature that helps in creating a workflow of variant database administration tasks, which can be run automatically using a predefined schedule or manually triggered by the user.
SQL Server Maintenance Plans allow you to use typical database maintenance tasks or customize your own task using a T-SQL script that runs on the local server or group of SQL Servers, providing more flexibility to the database administration tasks.
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The Multidimensional Cube option of Analysis Services has handled many-to-many relationships with ease for many versions before 2016. The Tabular had a work around using DAX formulas until the release of SQL Server 2016. There are still some limitations to many-to many in Tabular but of course, there are some “tricks” to overcome the limitations. But, the many-to-many relationship will be in businesses data for many years to come. A solution has to be provided when it comes to Analysis Service databases.
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SQL Server In-Memory OLTP, also known as Hekaton when it was introduced in SQL Server 2014, provides us with the ability to move specific database tables and suitable stored procedures into memory and compile the stored procedures into native x86 code. As a result, you can easily query these database objects directly from memory with the best performance and the least possible data access latency. In addition to that, the SQL Server Engine will no longer use the old latching and locking mechanism to control the data access concurrency. Instead, a high performance row versioning mechanism will be used to control the concurrency. This optimistic concurrency mechanism is 5 times to 20 times faster than the normal disk-based processing, due to reading the data from the memory directly.
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One of the recent tasks I undertook on configuring Transparent Data encryption (TDE) using asymmetric key protection with Azure Key Vault with Always On opened a different dimension on securing data for me. Even though it seems slightly complex, if you have the key details, the steps are in fact, really straight forward.
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The SQL Server Database Engine stores data changes in the buffer pool, in memory, before applying it to the database files, for I/O performance reasons. After that, a special kind of background process, called Checkpoint, will write all of these not reflected pages, also known as Dirty Pages, to the database data and log files periodically.
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The concept of data compression is not a new on for SQL Server Database Administrators , as it is was introduced the first time in SQL Server 2008. In that SQL Server version, you were able to configure the compression at the row and page levels on the table, index, indexed view or the partition. The row and page level compression is not the best choice in all cases, as it does not work well on the Binary Large Objects (BLOB) datatypes, such as the videos, images and text documents.
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The idea behind this article is to discuss the importance and the implication of SQL Partition and understand the SQL truncate command partitioning enhancements in SQL 2016
One of the biggest challenges for a DBA is to identify the right candidate for table partitioning, as it requires expertise in design and implementation.
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Microsoft released many new features in Reporting Services with the SQL 2016 release.:
The SQL Server Always On Availability Groups concept was introduced the first time in SQL Server 2012 as an enterprise-level high availability and disaster recovery solution that will replace the database mirroring feature. Always On Availability Group provides a high availability solution on the group level, where each group can contain any number of databases that can be replicated to multiple secondary servers known as Replicas.
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SQL Server 2016 is the most advanced version of Microsoft’s Data Platform released yet. This is obviously my favorite one as it has tremendous capabilities and enormous features. These new additions not only enhance the productivity of its users (Database Developer, DBA or Application Developer), but also enable the enterprise to use its data more effectively and efficiently.
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SQL Server 2016 obtains the values of the date and time using the GetSystemTimeAsFileTime() Windows API, with precision fixed at 100 nanoseconds. The accuracy of these date and time values depends on the hardware specs and the version of the Windows of the server on which the SQL Server instance installed.
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JSON is an abbreviation for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is very popular and currently the most commonly used data exchange format. Most modern web and mobile services return information formatted as JSON text, all database web services, web browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer) return results formatted as JSON text or accept data formatted as JSON. Since external systems format information as JSON text, JSON is also stored in SQL Server 2016 as text. You can use standard NVARCHAR columns to store JSON data in SQL Server 2016.
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There are many ways to process your SSAS Tabular Model. This can be achieved in SSIS using the Analysis Services Execute DDL Task or manually, through Management studio GUI but to have a little fun & make the task more flexible I’m going to script this with ASSL/TMSL & build a notification round it. We can then schedule this as a step in a SQL agent job, call it from SSIS or PowerShell.
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From time to time, we may encounter the following scenarios when dealing with data processing:
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It’s not often that I write negative articles surrounding SQL Server’s latest release but ever since we upgraded one of our BI boxes to run SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 (SSRS 2016), I have picked up on some frustrations from my team when using the upgraded Report Manager portal due to the unavailability of features that used to exist in versions prior to SSRS 2016. I have since realized that in spite of the many exciting features and improvements introduced in SSRS 2016, there is a downside to this latest version of reporting services that is likely to leave many administrators frustrated.
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Importing and exporting CSV files is a common task to DBAs from time to time.
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Scaling out Reporting services to multiple nodes, in itself, is a relatively simple process. It’s when we come to solve problems and investigate performance that we begin to see there is a lot more going on under the hood that’s not clear through implementation. There are also some foundational elements that have changed in SQL 2016 with next to no guidance from Microsoft on the changes.
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