Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server network configuration

June 14, 2016 by

SQL Server Network Configuration involves enabling the protocols that manage the connection to the SQL Server and configuring the available options for these network protocols. It also provides the means to encrypt the communication between the SQL Server instance and the client applications and hide the SQL Server instance from being browsed. SQL Server Network Configuration can be managed using the SQL Server Configuration Manager tool.

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Marko Zivkovic

New feature in SQL Server Management Studio 2016 – Quick Launch

June 14, 2016 by

What is Quick Launch?

Quick Launch is a new feature that is added in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2016. Quick Launch is search tool, but it doesn’t search code/contents of the script/files. Instead it searches SSMS itself including menu items, options and file names. Quick Launch is enabled by default when SSMS is installed and it is located at the top right corner of the menu bar (see below):

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Daniel Calbimonte

Is this the end of SQL Profiler?

June 13, 2016 by

Introduction

SQL Server Profiler is still a tool used to monitor our relational databases and our multidimensional ones. We used for performance and security purposes. However, in the SQL Server 2016, they announced that the SQL Profiler will be deprecated in future versions.

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Ahmad Yaseen

Querying remote data sources in SQL Server

June 10, 2016 by

A common activity when writing T-SQL queries is connecting to local databases and processing data directly. But there will be situations in which you need to connect to a remote database that is located in a different instance in the same server or in a different physical server, and process its data in parallel with the local data processing.

SQL Server provides us with four useful methods to connect to the remote database servers, even other database server types, and query its data within your T-SQL statement. In this article, we will discuss these four methods and how to use it to query remote SQL Server databases.

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Nikola Dimitrijevic

Troubleshooting the CXPACKET wait type in SQL Server

June 8, 2016 by

The SQL Server CXPACKET wait type is one of the most misinterpreted wait stats. The CXPACKET term came from Class Exchange Packet, and in its essence, this can be described as data rows exchanged among two parallel threads that are the part of a single process. One thread is the “producer thread” and another thread is the “consumer thread”. This wait type is directly related to parallelism and it occurs in SQL Server whenever SQL Server executes a query using the parallel plan.

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Robert Seles

Installing SQL Server 2016

June 7, 2016 by

Introduction

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 provides faster transactions and queries, deeper insights on any device, advanced analytics, new security technology, and new hybrid cloud scenarios. Along with these features, comes the new installation setup. Although it is similar to the installation of SQL Server 2014 and other older versions, there are few notable differences:

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Timothy Smith

Useful DBCC log commands

June 1, 2016 by

Background

When we’re architecting or troubleshooting issues in an environment, understanding how the log is set up and its history helps us identify if improving it will carry significant impacts overall. We have some built in tools that we can use, such as DBCC LOGINFO and DBCC SQLPERF and in this tip we look at how we can use them when we’re debugging issues, designing our logs for scale, or monitoring our current setup. We also look at some ways we can retain the information these provide so that we can use this for historic measurements and benchmarking, as well as using them for potentially alerting.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server 2014 contained databases

June 1, 2016 by

SQL Server provides two ways to authenticate users; SQL Server Authentication, which requires a predefined username and password to connect to the SQL Server, and Windows Authentication, in which SQL Server trusts the windows integrated user. The server level user that is authenticated to connect to the SQL Server is called a Server Login. This login should be mapped to a database user and granted permissions at the database level in order to access the database and be able to perform the authorized tasks. The relationship between the Server login and the database user in addition to the database metadata stored in the master system database draw up the dependencies between the SQL Server databases the server-level resources.

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Marko Radakovic

Revision history of an object change in a SQL database using Team Foundation Server

May 31, 2016 by

Similarly, as described previously in this article, where the revision history is covered for the Git source control system, we’ll present the workflow of reviewing the history of committed SQL database objects using Team Foundation Server (TFS) source control system. In order to use TFS and have SQL database objects being version controlled, Visual Studio is required, as well as TFS server, either installed on a machine or TFS through Team Services, which is actually TFS “in the cloud”.

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Ed Pollack

Creating the perfect schema documentation script

May 27, 2016 by

Description

System views allow us to gain access to information about any objects within SQL Server, from tables to extended properties to check constraints. This information can be collected and used for many purposes, one being the need to document our objects without the need to click endlessly in the GUI or to incur an immense amount of manual work.

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Timothy Smith

Monitoring changes in SQL Server using change data capture

May 27, 2016 by

Background

In multi-user environments, changes may occur frequently to the architecture, data, or overall structure that creates work for other users. In this series, we look at some ways that we can track changes on the data and architecture layer for pin-pointing times, changes, and using the information for alerting, if changes should be kept to a minimum. SQL Server comes with some built-in tools that allow us to monitor changes, and depending on the architecture, we can create tools that allow us also to monitor and identify changes near the time that they occur.

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Timothy Smith

Some replication architecture errors and their resolutions

May 16, 2016 by

Background

From time to time, I’ve run into replication issues in inherited environments that I did not architect and some of these environments experienced errors in replication because of how it was constructed from the beginning. In this tip, we look at some of the basics in replication architecture and then at solving some of these problems. Some of the replication issues I’ve seen are caused by misunderstanding what is impossible and possible with replication.

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Daniel Calbimonte

Azure Cosmos DB from zero to 10 minutes

May 10, 2016 by

Introduction

In our last chapter, we talked about Cosmos DB, which is available in Azure and explained that it is an Azure Database used to store NoSQL documents.

In this new article, we will show how to create and query the database from zero. The only requirement is to have an Azure Account. If you have an Azure account, this tutorial will take you just 10 minutes (if not, you can complain in the comments section below 😉 ).

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Timothy Smith

Troubleshooting some waits issues

May 10, 2016 by

Background

On occasion, I’ll see waits that exceed what I expect well above normal and a few of them have some architecture and standards to consider following when troubleshooting, though like most waits’ issues, there can be other underlying factors that are happening as well. In this article, I investigate the three waits ASYNC_NETWORK_IO and WRITELOG. In general, waits vary by environment and server, so before reading this article an immediate question to ask is, “Do you know what’s normal for yours?” When a wait suddenly spikes, or if the architecture is designed in a manner that should prevent a specific wait from consuming time, and yet you see that the wait does, I would be concerned. In addition, because applications and environments differ by architecture, you may want to consider other troubleshooting steps, as these may not apply to your situations.

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