SQL Server Articles

A couple of days back at I got a call from my support team informing me that one of our database located on the Production Server went into Suspect Mode. The version used was SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3. Being a Production Database server, it was a Priority 1 incident and the expected time [...]

When considering the security and protection of the database engine, one of the first considerations that comes to mind is SQL Server Fixed Server Roles. The Server Roles are named Fixed Server Roles as the user cannot alter these under any conditions. Assigning the appropriate roles to the user helps keep the SQL Server Environment [...]

In Implementing Transactions Part I I briefly described the role of Transactions in SQL Server and outlined a very basic implementation. In this second part, I will explain how a DBA can best implement Transactions in scripts that are to be deployed on production databases. One of the regular tasks of a DBA is to [...]

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 [...]