Helping to make Hadoop easier by going Metro!

by Denny Lee [MSFT] via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 12/14/2011 6:27:45 PM

We are proud to announce that the community technology preview (CTP) of ApacheTM HadoopTM-based Services for Windows Azure (or Hadoop on Azure) is now available. As noted in on the SQL Server Data Platform Insider blog, the CTP is by invite only http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2011/12/14/availability-of-community-technology-preview-ctp-of-hadoop-based-service-on-windows-azure.aspx While Hadoop is important to our customers for performance, scalability, and extreme volumes ...

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A Computed Column Defined with a User-Defined Function Might Impact Query Performance

by Kun Cheng via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 11/28/2011 10:15:00 PM

Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Shaun Tinline-Jones, Silvano Coriani, Steve Howard, Thomas Kejser, Sanjay Mishra A computed column is computed from an expression that can use other columns in the same table. The expression can be a noncomputed column name, constant, function, and any combination of these connected by one or more operators, but the expression cannot be a subquery. A simple example of a computed column is: Col1 Col2 Computed_Col=(Col1+Col2) 100 100 200 A benefit o ...

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Writing New Hash Functions for SQL Server

by Thomas Kejser via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 11/28/2011 2:21:44 PM

Author: Thomas Kejser Contributors/Reviewers: Alexei Khalyako, Jerome Halmans, Fabricio Voznika, Sedat Yogurtcuoglu, Mike Ruthruff, Tobias Ternstrom and Steve Howard In this blog, I will explore ideas for extending SQL Server with new, fast hash functions. As will be shown, the high speed, built in functions CHECKSUM and BINARY_CHECKSUM are not always optimal hash functions, when you require the function to spread data evenly over an integer space. I will show that it can be useful to extend S ...

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What’s so BIG about “Big Data”?

by Denny Lee [MSFT] via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 11/15/2011 5:54:00 AM

As announced during the PASS Summit 2011 Day One Keynote, we are diving deeper into the world of Big Data by embracing and contributing to the open source community and Hadoop. We’ve had a lot of good coverage on this topic with some examples below. Microsoft Expands Data Platform With SQL Server 2012, New Investments for Managing Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere Microsoft makes its move with Hadoop on Azure and Windows Server Hortonworks, Microsoft Sign Co-Development Deal for Hadoop   ...

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Successfully execute an INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE against a Database Snapshot

by shauntj-us via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 10/18/2011 2:06:00 AM

Author: Shaun Tinline-Jones Reviewers: Mike Ruthruff, Sanjay Mishra, Alexei Khalyako Not too long ago an ISV that developed solutions using SQL Server as the RDBMS, asked me how they could query a database as at a point in time. This was a relatively easy answer, thanks to the Database Snapshot feature. I was however surprised at the next question “Can we update the database snapshot?” A reactive response is “No. You cannot update a Database Snapshot” Msg 390 ...

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Announcing Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux

by dpblogs via SQL Protocols on 10/13/2011 5:50:00 PM

Greetings Developer community: We heard yesterday and today at the PASS conference about the exciting new areas that we are investing in bringing the power of SQL Server to our customers. Many of our developers who rely on native connectivity to SQL Server primarily use ODBC for their connectivity needs. We have been supporting ODBC as a part of the SQL Native Access Client (SNAC) libraries. In our continued commitment to interoperability, today we also announced that we will be releasing the M ...

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SQLPASS 2011 SQLCAT Track

by Denny Lee [MSFT] via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 10/8/2011 9:05:00 PM

The SQLPASS 2011 summit is upon us again and all of our flocking to our fair city Seattle for our yearly technical-and-karoke fest!  If you are up for some technical deep dives, here is the list PASS sessions presented by SQLCAT!    And don’t forget to check out the Birds of Feather event – the tech talk luncheon.    Session Code Session Name Speakers DBA-414-M Are You Smarter Than An MCM?

Maximizing SQL Server Throughput with RSS Tuning

by Kun Cheng via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 9/27/2011 2:55:00 AM

Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Thomas Kejser, Curt Peterson, James Podgorski, Christian Martinez, Mike Ruthruff Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) was introduced in Windows 2003 to improve Windows scalability to handle heavy network traffic, which is typically the case for SQL Server OLTP workload. For more details about RSS improvement on Windows 2008, please check out the whitepaper - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463253.aspx and the blog - http://sqlcat.com/sqlcat/b/msdnm ...

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“QUOTED_IDENTIFIER” causes Unexpected Query Plan for Persisted Computed Column query

by shauntj-us via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 8/31/2011 4:09:00 PM

Author: Shaun Tinline-Jones Technical Reviewers: Thomas Kejser, Steve Howard, Jaime Alva Bravo, Kun Cheng, Jimmy May Note: Validation for this post was performed in the SQL CAT Customer Lab on an HP Proliant DL580 G7, Intel Xeon Nehalem E7-4870 2.40 GHz 4 socket, 10 physical cores, 20 logical cores for a total of 40 physical cores, 80 logical cores; 1TB RAM. SQL Server 2008 R2 was installed on a Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 1.28TB MCL using driver version 2.3.1 We recently engaged a Tier 1 Global ISV ...

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“QUOTED_IDENTIFIER” causes Unexpected Query Plan for Persisted Computed Column query

by shauntj-us via Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team on 8/31/2011 4:09:00 PM

Author: Shaun Tinline-Jones Technical Reviewers: Thomas Kejser, Steve Howard, Jaime Alva Bravo, Kun Cheng, Jimmy May Note: Validation for this post was performed in the SQL CAT Customer Lab on an HP Proliant DL580 G7, Intel Xeon Nehalem E7-4870 2.40 GHz 4 socket, 10 physical cores, 20 logical cores for a total of 40 physical cores, 80 logical cores; 1TB RAM. SQL Server 2008 R2 was installed on a Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 1.28TB MCL using driver version 2.3.1 We recently engaged a Tier 1 Global ISV ...

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