Breaking news lady and gentlemen. In case you missed it, SQL Server 2016 is live from MSDN subscription. As a reminder, this version offers a lot of very interesting new features and enhancements. Here a summary of the new features per edition. From my part, I’m looking forward to see what it was made of in real customer cases, especially new…
A lot of customer’s feedbacks are about difficulties to find easily SQL Server tools. Now, it is easier… 😉 A unified web page for SQL Server Tools The first good news is that Microsoft unified and gathered these tools for SQL Server on a single web page: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt238365.aspx As DBA, this page is absolutely to be marked in your browser.…
Before SQL Server 2016, we use Trace Flag to display information about backup and restore operations like the 3004, 3014, 3213 or 3604. Here a link to the MSDN with a great SQL Server trace flag list SQL Server 2016 provides 2 new Extended Events: backup_restore_progress_trace database_backup_restore_throughput backup_restore_progress_trace will give detailed information during the backup process and restore operation database_backup_restore_throughput…
The first RTM release of SQL Server 2016 will be released soon. It’s official now! Indeed, Microsoft announced here the SQL Server 2016 RTM release being generally available for use the 1st June 2016. What does this mean? Well, customers who have been thinking either to upgrade their SQL Server environments or to install a new architecture can now include…
Since this year, Microsoft recommends to install Cumulative Updates (CU) like Service Packs (SP) In the past, Microsoft always recommended to apply the Service Packs and security fixes for SQL Server. Cumulative Updates were applied only if you had a specific problem in order to resolve it. Now, we need to follow a new rule: “ Microsoft recommends ongoing, proactive…
In my last article, I wrote about the R Services into SQL Server. Now, Microsoft provides an open source R platform to complete this new SQL Server integrated feature in 2016. On the Microsoft Website, you can download directly R Server 2016 for different operating systems: Windows of course SUSE Linux Red Hat Linux Version for Hadoop on Red Hat…
I was during a long time captivated by the R programming language. I’m happy to see that SQL Server 2016 provides now a SQL Server R Services. This service enables SQL Server to execute R scripts. The first step is to install the R Services during the installation of SQL Server. As you can see on the picture, you have…
As you may certainly know, the last release candidate of SQL Server 2016 (RC3) has been released by Microsoft a couple of days ago. You may find the announcement here. As usual, after downloading the binaries from my msdn subscription, I performed a first fresh installation of the underlying operating system (Windows Server 2016 TP4) by using my preferred set…
This month, the Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for SQL Server is available. With this new version, you can now use the “CREATE TABLE” command for Stretch Databases. If you read the msdn page from CREATE TABLE for SQL Server 2016, you can see these options: The first step is to enable the functionality for the database “AdventureWorksDW2012” To enable the…
In this blog post, let’s continue with other database-scoped options shipped with the SQL Server 2016 RC0. We will first begin with the first one and my preferred option: setting the MAXDOP value for an individual database. I really hope that applications like SharePoint that requires to limit the MAXDOP to 1 at the server level will use this kind…
Do you remember new capabilities shipped with SQL Server 2016 CTP2 about tempdb? In this blog post, I talked about well-known trace flags 1117 and 1118 that become useless for tempdb because their related effects are automatically applied to tempdb. Another interesting news that comes from the new SQL Server 2016 RC0 is the use of new database-scoped parameters AUTOGROW_SINGLE_FILE…
Did you miss aggregate pushdown capability shipped with columnstore index? Well, I remember the first time I heard about it is was when I read the very interesting blog post of Niko Neugebauer here with a very good covering of the topic (principle, advantages and limitations). So why to write a new blog post here? Well because since the last…
