Recently, at a customer site, I discovered the Attunity connector 1.1 for Oracle. The customer uses this connector to transfer data from Oracle to SQL Server using Integration Services (SSIS) and informed me that performances are greatly improved. So I decided to post a blog about this connector and perform a benchmark between Attunity connector and Microsoft OLE DB provider for Oracle.

In my previous article, I announced the first fix for SQL Server 2012.

One week later, the first cumulative update is available on the Microsoft website.

This is just a little blog posting to announce that the first fix for SQL Server 2012 came out last week during Easter Break.

Since the commercial version of SQL Server 2012 is due to be released in April, a little posting about the changed licensing costs seems appropriate.

Recently, during one of my missions, a client asked me to give him access rights to the SQL Server logs from SSMS to his application managers. As you know, you must grant the role “securityadmin” to have such rights. However, with this role you can also manage logins, CREATE DATABASEs and change passwords.

These are “too many rights” for an IT manager, but there seems to be no other way ... or is there?

The so called Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version of SQL Server 2012 now is available.

Following my article about Windows 8, Microsoft today released the customer preview. This is just a small posting to announce this fresh news!

I have decided to take some time in this cold month of February to continue this small series. This time, I'm going to speak about Reporting Services (SSRS) and some new features. Like my other article "SQL Server 2012: New features on Integration Services (SSIS)", this article presents a summary of new features and enhancements for SQL 2012 Reporting Services.

Like other SQL server 2012 products, Integration Services has a lot of new features and enhancements. I am presenting a summary of these new "goodies" (from CTP1 to RC0), which can be powerful for DBAs and developers.

Since the third CTP version of SQL Server 2012 (codename Denali), there are some new features available to provide an additional value like the for other Microsoft SQL Server versions. These are pooled in the so called 'Feature Pack' as well as in the 'Manageability Tool Kit'. Both are already available, but not in the final version. I have compiled all information in this blog to find it easily. All DBAs should know that Feature Pack exists, how to find it, and of course use it.

I have seen at a customer that SQL Server's policy doesn't follow Microsoft's recommendations about antivirus and databases (kb 309422), such as excluding *.mdf,*.ndf and *.ldf files. In addition, there is no Oracle policy in case of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (known as FEP 2010).

I have decided to create generic databases policies for FEP (optimized by dbi services) adapted for all SQL Server and Oracle environments.

Since a few days, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Express LocalDB Release Candidate 0 is online.

We were looking forward to it and it has finally arrived...

Since Friday, 18 November, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Release Candidate 0 is online.

For a few months, I have been testing the new  SQL Server 2012 (codename Denali) and I was very surprised from the DMVs of this version. Dynamic management views (DMVs) return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems and tune performance. I will focus on some DMVs which are very interesting for a DBA.

During our test to create a failover clustering with the new function 'AlwaysOn High Availability', we had a few difficulties to overcome like the databases restore on the secondary cluster node.

In this article, we will explain how to avoid it before encountering the problem.

I was at the Microsoft Connection Days 2011 in Lausanne yesterday and saw a presentation on Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V 3.0. I take this opportunity to give you some news on this.

Today, Microsoft gives us his secrets of the next SQL Server version.

Performance tunning is becoming a key focus for most of the DBAs. In scope of the "dbi services labs", I made some tests on functions which can help improving these, but which are not always well-known. Today's article is going to describe one of these, the SPARE COLUMNS.
The property of Spare columns is not the most used in client environment that we have seen.
This article present a script to find the potential columns that can have the sparse property with the usage restrictions to make a space tuning in your database and especially for Data Warehouse (DWH).

The database example that we used, is AdventureWorksDW2008R2.

At dbi services, we have a few people passionate about diving. Let me take this opportunity to let you dive into the two databases lakes Oracle and SQL Server to see their similarities and differences. For this first level of diving (named ODD), we will not be going too deep for reasons of narcosis or databases toxicity. As always, we will start with a short briefing to present the environment and the different themes. Have a nice dive !

Following the first publication of a video on Windows 8 (June 2011, YouTube), I would like to present some information about Windows 8 to you. Windows 8 (codename Chidori) is the current name given by Microsoft successor from operating system Windows 7.