Among the hidden features provided by SQL Server 2014 there is a very interesting dynamic management view named sys.dm_exec_query_profiles. This feature will help the database administrators and experienced developers to troubleshoot long running queries in real-time. I’m pretty sure you had to deal with the following questions: When will this query finish? What percentage of total workload is performed by…
A couple of weeks ago, I had to provide some best practices in term of architecture for a “heavy writes” environment that consists in importing data from different sources into SQL Server tables. At the customer place, I was asked about interesting new SQL Server features that could be used to increase the performance speed of the data import process.…
For my first blog post at dbi services, I think it could be a good opportunity to begin by discussing around SQL Server 2014, Hekaton memory optimized tables, and hash indexes. When you create a memory optimized table you have to consider the number of buckets that you have to reserve for its associated hash index. It’s an important aspect…
Delayed Transaction Durability is a new SQL Server 2014 feature that was not included in SQl Server 2014 CTP1 but discreetly published in CTP2. It is a very interesting functionality that helps reducing the IO contention for transaction log writes. In other databases engine, you will find equivalents such as: Oracle: ‘COMMIT WRITE BATCH WAIT|NOWAIT’ (link here) MySQL: ‘group_commit’ since…
Some customers or colleagues recently asked me about the SQL Server concept xVelocity and in particular the SQL Server 2014 feature new xVelocity memory optimized columnstore index. So I decided to write a few words on the dbi services blog. What is xVelocity? Introduced in SQL Server 2012, xVelocity is composed of two features: xVelocity in-memory analytics engine xVelocity memory-optimized…
During North America TechEd, Microsoft released some details on the upcoming release of Windows Server. This new version is called Windows Server 2012 R2 and will be at the heart of the Microsoft Cloud OS. Windows Server 2012 R2 is currently in preview and will be soon available for evaluation purposes. Register to be notified when the new product evaluation…
I recently faced a problem in Visual Studio LightSwitch 2012 with SQL Server views. I attached an external datasource to my project and when I tried to import my view (which is very simple) I experienced some issues. Here is my View in SQL Server 2012: During the import process a warning says my view doesn’t have any primary key…
I have recently read that PowerPivot and Power View are natively present in Office 2013 and especially in Excel 2013. I found this fun and decided to install the preview of Office 2013!:-D First, what are PowerPivot and Power View? PowerPivot is an add-on to Excel which is used for adding and integrating large amounts of data in Excel workbooks.…
Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new application development tool wich allows to create fast and nice web and desktop applications. The development environment is the same as the other .NET development tools and creating a new application with LightSwitch works, at the beginning, exactly like with other .NET application: create a new project and choose your programmation’s language between…
