Christian Bolton's SQL Server Blog

SQL Server troubleshooting in Chinese…

Christian — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:05:35 GMT

If you feel like you know everything there is to know about SQL Server 2008 and you wish Microsoft would just hurry up with SQL Server Denali so you can learn some new stuff, here’s something to try while you wait: troubleshooting SQL Server 2008 in Chinese:

I arrived home today to find a couple of copies of the newly translated Chinese version of Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting waiting for me and I’ve been flicking through it this evening in childish awe that someone would want to go to all that trouble.

Thank you mystery translators for such an object of curiosity to decorate the Coeo office, I hope your efforts are rewarded well and it proves to be a popular read in China!

Christian Bolton – Coeo Ltd
Technical Director
Microsoft Certified Architect: SQL Server
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server
SQL Server MVP
Follow me on Twitter|Watch me at SQLBits

Coeo are giving away the entire SQL Server MCM reading list at SQLBits

Christian — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:43:53 GMT

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ll be giving away the entire recommended reading list for the Microsoft Certified Master on SQL Server 2008 certification to one lucky attendee at the upcoming SQLBits 8 event in Brighton between 7th and 9th April 2011.

This dream collection of books, worth the over £500, will be useful to anyone who considers SQL Server to be a significant part of their career and will provide essential preparation for anyone pursuing the certification.

If you are studying for the MCM qualification or even just thinking about it, make sure you come and visit our exhibitor stand on the 8th and 9th April to share your MCM preparation stories with us and get more details on how to enter the competition.

Click here to read more about Microsoft Certified Master- Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Good luck!

Regards,

Christian Bolton – Coeo Ltd
Technical Director
Microsoft Certified Architect: SQL Server
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server
SQL Server MVP
Follow me on Twitter|Watch me at SQLBits

Welcoming Gavin Payne to Coeo

Christian — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:07:20 GMT

I’m very pleased to announce that Gavin Payne starts with us today as a Senior Consultant!

We’ve known Gavin for a while now through his work in the UK SQL Server Community and when a role came up in our consulting practice I took the opportunity to talk to him about it.

Gavin brings a broad range of experience from his recent background as a Solution Architect and has a particular interest in virtualization which is very prominent in the work that we do so we’re thrilled to have him on board.

He’s also presenting a couple of sessions at the upcoming SQLBits conference in Brighton where Coeo is once again sponsoring and exhibiting so be sure to congratulate him in person if you’re going to be there!

Gavin has a prolific online presence so be sure to subscribe to his blog and follow him on twitter!

Blog: http://blog.gavinpayneuk.com/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/gavinpayneuk

SQLBits: http://sqlbits.com/Speakers/Gavin_Payne

Welcome Gavin!

Christian Bolton - MCA, MCM, MVP
Technical Director
http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services

Learning about sparse columns and filtered indexes

Christian — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:01:35 GMT

I’ve been brushing up on sparse columns and filtered indexes recently and two resources stood out for me as indispensable so I’d thought I’d share them.

Those of you studying for Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server will no doubt have found the Readiness Videos published on TechNet and Kimberley Tripp’s (Blog|Twitter) webcast in this series on Sparse columns provides an excellent resource showing different schema designs and specifically where sparse columns fit in.

MCM Readiness Video on Sparse columns by Kimberly Tripp

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/ff977043

The second resource is a session from this years PASS Summit (2010) by Don Vilen (Twitter) called Filtered Indexes, Sparse Columns: Together, Separately (AD203).

I thought this session was great and in combination with Kimberly’s webcast provides the perfect background for anyone wanting to learn this topic, especially for those studying for the MCM knowledge exam.

If you attended PASS you should have a login to stream Don’s session but if not you can buy the official DVD’s from http://www.sqlpass.org The DVDs are worthy investment considering how much material you get access to!

Regards,

Christian

Christian Bolton - MCA, MCM, MVP
Technical Director
http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services

twitter: @christianbolton

Last day in Seattle and PASS Summit 2010 DVDs

Christian — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 19:14:27 GMT

I’ve just had a great morning in downtown Seattle meandering through Pike Place Market with a Piroshky and a latte from Starbucks’ first ever store debating whether or not I could get a massive Dungeness crab through customs on the way home.

Seattle manages to maintain a magical charm no matter how many times you come here and nowhere more so than at Pike Place where the rows of fresh cut flowers, happy go lucky buskers and insanely large fish being thrown about to the gasps of the crowd create a real feel good factor regardless of the weather.

Mark Souza told me during the PASS summit that the SQL Server product group had sent 450 of their devs, PMs, and testers to PASS this year and it certainly showed, they were everywhere. You never had to go very far before you’d meet someone eager to get feedback on the product features that they work on and handing out business cards so you can contact them directly after the conference. It was just amazing and I haven’t even mentioned the sessions!

There have been some requests and debates to move the PASS Summit to different venues in the US rather than rainy old Seattle but the reality is that we only get the huge representation from Microsoft at the Summit because its in Seattle and I really do hope it stays here.

For the first time this year PASS have decided to offer not just the sessions on DVD for purchase but all the pre-cons and post-cons as well. That’s 18 full-day seminars for the pre and post cons alone. I went to Adam Machanic’s post-con and ordered the DVD’s just to get the recording of his session, it was just superb and I’ll be pouring over his content again for the next few months it was that good.

You can get the pricing and ordering information for the DVD’s here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Home/OnSiteFAQ/DVDs.aspx

For anyone that’s never been to a summit before I can’t recommend it enough and I challenge you to find any one of the 3,500 attendees that would say it isn’t worth every penny to attend.

I’m off to the airport now to head back to London. I hope to see many more of you here next year!

Regards,

Christian (twitter: @christianbolton )

Christian Bolton - MCA: SQL Server 2005, MCM: SQL Server 2005/2008, MVP
Technical Director
http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services

Meet the authors at SQLBits 7 – Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting

Christian — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:47:40 GMT

Five of the authors of Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting will be at SQLBits 7 next month which is the first time so many of us have been at a conference together. Four of us will be speaking, here is the line-up:

30th Sept

Brent Ozar: Virtualization, SAN and SQL Server: The Perfect Storm (Full-day pre-con)

1st Oct

Brent Ozar: Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs

Jonathan Kehayias: An Introduction to Extended Events

Christian Bolton: Consolidating data collection with SQLDIAG and analysing it in SQLNexus

Justin Langford: Notes from the field: High-Performance storage for SQL Server

2nd Oct

Brent Ozar: SQL Server Storage – 1,000GB Level

The first day has 7 pre-cons for you to choose from, the second day is jam-packed with MVP’s and other awesome speakers and the third day is absolutely FREE to attend. Sign-up here: http://www.sqlbits.com

I hope to see you there!

btw, Coeo are giving away a Fusion-IO card, did I mention that ;) http://bit.ly/ac5VCz

Regards,

Christian Bolton - MCA: SQL Server 2005, MCM: SQL Server 2005/2008, MVP
Technical Director
http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services

SQL Server perfmon counters and DMVs return zero values

Christian — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:32:04 GMT

I came across an interesting issue today where all the SQL Server performance monitor counters existed but all returned a zero in the results. Querying sys.dm_os_performance_counters also produced zero rows.

After a bit of head scratching and searching I found an MSDN forum post with the answer posted by Ivan Penkov from Microsoft: http://tinyurl.com/25w8vxo

If you change the service account for SQL Server while another process in reading the perfmon counters, “the shared memory section which contains the counter values and which is created under the old service account is kept alive [and] the new service account doesn’t have access to it”.

What was especially interesting was that the problem persisted through a reboot of the server.

In our case, the server was in a managed data centre and whilst we had disabled our own monitoring there was another service reading the perfmon counters when I changed the SQL Server service account and caused the issue that Ivan describes.

After stopping the hosting company’s monitoring service and restarting the SQL Server service everything was working again.

If only more issues were as straightforward as this to fix!

Regards,

Christian

Christian Bolton - MCA: SQL Server 2005, MCM: SQL Server 2005/2008, MVP
Technical Director
http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services

Coeo are giving away a Fusion-IO card at SQLBits

Christian — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:33:00 GMT

I am very excited to announce that to celebrate Coeo’s recent partnership with Fusion-IO we’ll be giving away an 80GB Fusion-IO ioEXTREME card to a lucky attendee at SQLBits.

If you’ve never looked at Fusion-IO before, now is your chance to check-out what you’ve been missing.

Have a look at the official product page for this card here:

http://www.fusionio.com/products/ioxtreme/

and then check-out Brent Ozar’s Fusion-IO review here:

http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/03/fusion-io-iodrive-review-fusionio/

The card we’re giving away is intended to supercharge a workstation and only requires a free PCI-E slot on your motherboard to install. Its capable of reading 64K packets at 670MB/s with an access latency of 80 microseconds. Remember when you were happy if SQL Server had <5 milliseconds of disk latency?

Watch this space for more details on the competition. You’ll have to be at SQLBits in York to be in with a chance so if you haven’t registered already click here to sign-up: http://www.sqlbits.com

See you all there in September!

Regards,

Christian

Christian Bolton - MCA: SQL Server 2005, MCM: SQL Server 2005/2008, MVP
Technical Director
http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services

Vital Statistics – free webcast now available

Christian — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:53:10 GMT

Another one of my sessions from SQLBits V, this time on SQL Server Statistics. You can it from the SQLBits website: http://tinyurl.com/yb2t2v5

The presentation was based on information that you’ll also find in my latest book, Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting so if you like it you might want to check out some of the other material.

Regards,

Christian Bolton - MCA: SQL Server 2005, MCM: SQL Server 2005/2008, MVP
Technical Director
http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services

Troubleshooting memory problems in SQL Server 2008 - webcast now available

Christian — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:24:21 GMT

My session from SQLBits V in November 2009 titled “Strapped for Cache: Troubleshooting memory problems in SQL Server 2008” is now available as free webcast from the SQLBits website: http://tinyurl.com/yb2t2v5

Brent Ozar also posted a great write-up of the session on his blog which you can find here: http://tinyurl.com/ybqrccj

The presentation was based on information that I wrote in the memory chapter of my latest book, Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting so if you find the session useful you might want to check out the rest of the content in the book.

Regards,

Christian Bolton - MCA: SQL Server 2005, MCM: SQL Server 2005/2008, MVP
Technical Director
http://coeo.com - SQL Server Consulting & Managed Services