n the business world, a good RDMS is one that can provide high availability (HA) options with minimal downtime and the cheapest licenses. Vendors usually if not always provide a set of HA features to satisfy different needs. Usually, some of these features are reserved for higher-end editions. The most important factors to consider when choosing an edition are…

I’ve rewritten this blog post in the series to include other new features in SQL Server 2012 outside of high availability and disaster recovery. Ever since the product has been released, I’ve had a chance to look at features that will address performance challenges and business intelligence requirements.

Until very recently, SQL Azure was the only solution offering SQL Server on cloud, Google Cloud SQL offering only MySQL, and Amazon offering MySQL and Oracle. Not anymore! The online retail and cloud solution giant is now offering SQL server as part of its RDS service and also added ASP.NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

When preparing for the the IOUG Collaborate 12’s deep dive on deploying Oracle Databases for High Availability, I wanted to provide some feedback on which hardware components are failing most and least frequently. I believe I have a reasonably good idea of the answer, but I thought that providing some more objective data would be better. I couldn’t find results from a more scientific research, so I decided to organize a poll. This blog post shows the results, which I promised to share with several groups.

In this post I quickly cover the new features in SQL Server RC0 setup.

In this post I’ll Briefly cover the changes to SQL Server licencing which happened in two areas, edition changes and licensing changes. Lets get started.

Use NOLOCK hint to avoid block – this is what I have often heard/see in many forums I participate in, during local user group events and meetings. I have always advised that its not that good idea to use hints, as it may cause data corruption and blocking. And anyways, there are many things that you can do to avoid blocking, like:

I have seen lots of questions floating in the msdn forums about SSPI Handshake error, the main question is around error code 0x80090311 which is indicative of the authentication failure error. Apart from this, there are many other reasons for SSPI Handshake error to appear in error logs. I cover them here.

In this blog, I am going to demonstrate how we can use the wait event category sqlos.wait_info* to track the wait resources the queries running in a particular session undergo.

If you ever used SQL server Database Engine Tuning Advisor then you know you have few options as a source of analysis workload, here they are.