CSS SQL Server Engineers

I was looking at data from a customer, in a different time zone (UTC+1) from mine, this week involving SQL Server AlwaysOn (HADRON) and found that lining up the timestamps in the various logs was challenging.   Some times are local to the SQL...

As I prepare for my next PASS Summit talk for the upcoming 2012 Summit, Inside SQLOS 2012 I was reviewing my talk from last year, Inside Tempdb , and some of the questions and feedback I received. They say it is never too late to provide all the facts...

I recently worked on two Bulk Insert cases that dealt with Kerberos. My favorite past time! In both cases, the customers were hitting the following error: Msg 4861, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Cannot bulk load because the file "<file name>"...

The lease is used between the SQL Server resource DLL and the SQL Server instance to prevent split-brain from occurring for the availability group (AG). The lease is a standard signaling mechanism between the SQL Server resource DLL and the SQL Server...

I was working with a customer who was encountering problems trying to use a PerformancePoint Dashboard against an Analysis Services Instance. The issue came down to the Claims to Windows Token Service (C2WTS) configuration.  This is used to take...

SQL Server Books Online alludes to the fragmentation possibility but does not fully explain that the Online Index rebuilding may increase fragmentation when it is allowed to run with MAX DOP > 1 and ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = OFF directives . The process of...

One of the things I often try to do is make sure I understand the experience of customers when installing new versions of SQL Server or existing versions of SQL Server on new Windows Operating Systems. So I took a recent tour of the experience installing...

Since it took me several days to track down this bug, and I did learn a couple of new things along the way, I thought I would share some of my work. 16 or More CPUS When a system presents SQL Server with 16 or more CPUs, and you are using a high end SQL...

Along with the expected challenges of the services world (rapidly changing features and quick adoption of new services), there are some unexpected ones.  One of the most recent ones I have dealt with involved some unexpected ALTER DATABASE operations...

I had an interesting case that was presented to me by our friends in the SharePoint support team.  The issue was that when they go to use a Data Source for Reporting Services that is set to use Windows Authentication, they saw the following: Within...

If you have followed my posts, or caught my sessions at PASS, you may have figured out that Kerberos is one of my strength areas.  I recently setup a Windows 2012 server to just see how SharePoint Integration with Reporting Services would work out...

I’ve been seeing a few cases that relate to a previous blog post which involved an AccessDeniedException when trying to perform report operations.  However, I ran into a different variation that involved the same error.  The scenario was that...

Here is the an issue I saw come across an alias that is a gotcha! I’m running into a problem connecting to an AlwaysOn read-intent secondary and I was wondering if someone could help me out.  I have the .Net Framework 4.5 installed and the newest...

This is a simple issue but if you don't expect the behavior it can surprise you. The grid, used by SSMS, is limited to a maximum number of rows, that can be displayed, of 1 million.    Note:  There is no warning dialog or flashing...

Suresh and I have blogged about these issues before but this post will put another spin on the information, as it applies to BIG DATA . Previous Blog References http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2008/07/10/sql-server-reports-operating-system-error...

I ran into an interesting case yesterday that brought back some memories.  The customer had a SQL 2008 R2 instance of Reporting Services that they were upgrading to SQL 2012.  They didn’t get far into the upgrade when they hit the following...

I worked a case today where they were trying to get SQL 2012 Reporting Services installed in a SharePoint environment that also had SQL 2008 R2 PowerPivot installed.  This, by itself, is fine and wasn’t really causing the problem.  When they...

I ran into an issue where the AG was no longer present on a specific node of my cluster but I had NOT dropped the AG from another node in the cluster.  ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2012/06/13/how-it-works-drop-availability-group-behaviors...

I actually ran into this issue back in late April.  I wanted to get this out sooner but life happened.  This issue has started to crop up a lot more as more people are starting to use Reporting Services 2012 in SharePoint Integrated mode. ...

A customer had encountered an issue with their SharePoint 2010 / Reporting Services 2012 deployment.  They had setup a Data Source for Reporting Services that was setup to connect to a stand alone Analysis Services instance.  When they clicked...

While setting up a SharePoint 2010 environment with Reporting Services 2012, I hit an interesting error. To explain my setup, this is a Classic Mode Auth site with Kerberos enabled for the site. I had verified that I had the proper accounts configured...

I just learned something new about the DROP AVAILABILITY GROUP command behavior that I didn't realize.  The comment on TechNet, alludes to how DROP works but we definitely need to update our documentation. Remove an Availability Group (SQL Server...

FlushCache is the SQL Server routine that performs the checkpoint operation.  The following message is output to the SQL Server error log when trace flag ( 3504 ) is enabled. 2012-05-30 02:01:56.31 spid14s     FlushCache: cleaned...

I am on several e-mail aliases related to Always On databases (reference Availability Group, AG, HADRON) and the question of worker thread usage is a hot topic this week.  I developed some training around this during the beta so I decided to pull...

Getting back into the swing of things, I thought I would post my thoughts about how SQL Rally 2012 went along with sharing some of the experiences.  I had posted before about what our presence would be like at Rally.  You can read that here...