SQL Server Articles

A basic requirements in most SQL Server based applications is implementing a database operation (DDL or DML) in a single unit of work. The DDL requirement is more from a DBA’s perspective rather than the application, since any application would perform only INSERTs, UPDATEs and DELETEs on the existing data, and a DBA would be [...]

From the previous AlwaysOn Availability Group article, we provided a name for the availability group listener which is simply a unique DNS name as a Virtual Network Name (VNN) to direct read-write requests to the primary replica and read-only requests to the read-only secondary replica. In this way the client doesn’t need to know which [...]

In the previous article on AlwaysOn Availability Groups in SQL Server 2012, we looked at The Environmental Setup for An AlwaysOn Availability Group. In this article we turn our attention to the creation and configuration of the Availability Group. There are two primary steps to creating an AlwaysOn availability group which has to be done [...]

Continuing from AlwaysOn Part 1 the series continues with a step-by-step guide to setting up the environment for an AlwaysOn availability group. In this article we will break down AlwaysOn environment preparation into three steps : Installation of SQL Server 2012 on each node/replica/server. Installation of the failover clustering feature on each node/replica/server. Creation of [...]

This is the first in a four-part series on the new AlwaysOn feature in SQL Server 2012. In this article, AlwaysOn is introduced and contrasted with previous high-availability solutions in SQL Server. The second part of the series will commence with a detailed walkthrough on preparing the environment for AlwaysOn. Prior to SQL Server 2012, [...]

New Built-in Functions in SQL Server 2012 SQL Server 2012 (Code named SQL Server Denali) introduces 14 new built in functions in four different categories with one existing function (LOG) being modified to have an optional second base parameter: Category Function Name Conversion functions PARSE TRY_CONVERT TRY_PARSE Date and Time functions DATEFROMPARTS DATETIME2FROMPARTS DATETIMEFROMPARTS DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS [...]

The Business Intelligence Semantic Model is one of the most significant enhancements in SQL Server 2012. BISM allows aspects of the traditional multidimensional model to coexist with the relational model in a format called the tabular model and can be used with all client tools in the Microsoft BI stack. The tabular model has its [...]

I recently encountered a situation where the drive hosting Sharepoint Databases in a Staging environment ran out of space. I logged onto the server and found that the msdb database has itself occupied 38 GB of the total disk space. Msdb database generally contain maintenance information for the database such as backups, log shipping and [...]

Recently I encountered a situation where the backup drive was short of space on the production server. The policy on the production server was that as soon as soon as the Full Backup is complete, a copy of the production backup is transferred to the staging server using RoboCopy and then on the staging server [...]

Performing a Database Restore is a part of a DBA’s daily life. A DBA may need to perform a Restore due to various reasons such as recovery, refreshing a database for testing purpose etc. Many times it can be difficult to perform a Restore due to corrupted media, low disk space on the server and [...]