SQL Server

Columnstore index rebuild cannot start

A couple of weeks ago, I was charged to migrate an SQL Server datawarehouse environment to a more recent version of SQL Server (from 2005 to 2012 in my case). After discussing with my customer we decided to benefit from(…)

syspolicy_purge_history job and PowerShell ExecutionPolicy

Since SQL Server 2008, Microsoft has introduced a system job called “syspolicy_purge_history”. This job is installed and enabled by default, and it contains three steps scheduled at 02:00 AM:   What is this job?(…)

SQL Server 2016: R Services

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(…)

Windows Container: installation and utilization

Some weeks ago, I did a general presentation about Windows Server 2016 and the new Container feature (here). Today, I will go through the installation and utilization of Windows Containers. I will use a Virtual Machine, under Hyper-V, during(…)

SQL Server 2016 : nonclustered columnstore index and aggregate pushdown

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(…)

SQL Server 2016: new upgrade advisor

I write this article because it is very interesting to see that the upgrade advisor has evolved… Recently (February 11, 2016), a new version is available: Microsoft® SQL Server 2016® Upgrade Advisor Preview 1.4 The msi package(…)

Sudden drop of the page life expectandy but don’t panic yet!

A couple of weeks ago, I had an interesting discussion with one of my customer about the page life expectancy (aka PLE). He asked me if monitoring the metric value is a best practice because he often noticed a big(…)

Changing an existing partition configuration … Well, not so easy!

This time let’s talk about an interesting customer scenario where table partitioning was implemented on a table with 100 GB of data on SQL Server 2014. Partitioning in this context aimed to save disk space  (archive data were compressed) , help(…)

SQL Server AlwaysOn: when a listener becomes the cluster and vice versa

Let’s talk about a funny story that concerns an interesting issue that I faced a couple of months ago at one of my customers. Initially, the problem concerned only the creation of an availability group listener but after deleting the(…)

NOLOCK is definitely not what you may expect …

For those who still believe that using nolock hint is a lock-free process, keep reading this blog post. I wrote a previous blog post 3 years ago, when I was at one of my customer and(…)