Greetings Developer community: We heard yesterday and today at the PASS conference about the exciting new areas that we are investing in bringing the power of SQL Server to our customers. Many of our developers who rely on native connectivity to SQL...

Greetings to the Developer community: Microsoft SQL Server team has been interacting on a regular basis with the developers and users in the form of surveys. During the last 2 years, we completed surveys that focused on the broad SQL Connectivity components...

Hello reader, We have extended our SQL Connectivity Customer Survey until November 2, 2010 5:00PM PST. If you have not done so please take a moment to fill our our easy 10 question survey listed below at the link to help shape the future of SQL Server...

Greetings to the SQL Server community: Last year in October 2009, we introduced the process of interacting on a regular basis with the developers and users in the form of surveys. During the last 12 months, we completed surveys that focused on the...

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 include many changes to the core operating system. This blog post is targeted at resolving the impact on SQL Server client drivers and SQL Server setup of one breaking change in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2...

Our colleagues over in the SQL Server Security team have developed an open tool for troubleshooting "Login Failure" errors. If you're having an issue with "Login Failure" errors and can't resolve it from the other SQL Protocols blog articles here, check...

Dear SQL Server developers and users: Our sister team, the SQL Server Native Client (SNAC), has a survey open to ask for your feedback as they take a step back to review the priorities and goals for the long term and identify areas that will benefit...

Secure connection to SQL Server can be enforced by different ways, e.g. forcing encryption by using “ ForceEncryption” property under the Network Configuration in the server. But this setting will force all clients to use encryption and any client that...

Dear SQL Server developers and users: It is this time of the year when we, in the SQL Connectivity product team, take a step back, review the priorities and goals for the long term and identify areas that will benefit from investments. We...

Recently, I worked on a customer issue. The customer encountered an "error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified" error although he has applied/verified every steps I posted in the blog: http://www.bing.com/search?q=error+26+blog+protocol&form...

This error message, which is associated with the Winsock error WSAENOBUFS and actually comes from Windows rather than SQL Server directly, has two well-understood root causes. However, it still stumps people today, probably because there is no single...

Endpoint configuration seems to be creating some confusion. I hope that this will clarify some of the behavior as it applies to TCP endpoints. With a default configuration of SQL Server, try the following: > select name, port, is_dynamic_port...

Lately we have noticed many misunderstandings surrounding the usage of the Data Source keyword in connection strings, caused by people generalizing from an example demonstrating a connection string for local connectivity and creating their own connection...

Sometimes we are asked about the possibility of configuring SQL Server protocols through PowerShell. In SQL Server 2008, the sqlps tool incorporates WMI and SMO into this powerful Windows administrator tool, making it easy to manage SQL Server protocols...

Some customers have reported connection failure because of wrong TDS version. The client application gets the following error message: (or similar depends on the protocol used) A connection was successfully established with the server, but then...

On a Windows Cluster it is possible to install a SQL Server Cluster, which will be a separate entity with disctinct Virtual Server Name, IP address, and pipe name. The nodes of the SQL Cluster must be able to communicate with one another. This communication...

SQL Server 2008 contains a new feature designed to help troubleshoot particularly tricky connectivity problems. This new feature, the Connectivity Ring Buffer, captures a record for each server-initiated connection closure, including each kill of a session...

Understanding the error message: “Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection.” This exact Login Failed error, with the empty string for the user name, has two unrelated classes of causes, one of which...

We have been seeing and trying to resolve SQL connectivity issue all the time. I guess it would be helpful if we can put some guidance on how to resolve connectivity issues. Here comes a proposal based on my experience. Basically, when you failed...

We see a couple of cases where customer could not connect to named instance on X64. They all have the following symptons. 1) Customer has no problem to connect X86 instance on the same server machine even if it's a named instance. Customer can even...

Sporadic “Connection forcibly closed by remote host” errors with SQL Server connections can be very difficult to troubleshoot and resolve. This blog post is targeted at diagnosing TOE/Chimney issues that may lead to this client error message. Chimney...

After installing SQL Server 2008, some users might notice that sqlbrowser.exe is installed under %ProgramFiles%Microsoft SQL Server\90\Shared, rather than %ProgramFiles%Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared as some users expect. When setup fails for some reason...

Did you know that beginning with SQL Server 2008, support for service principal names (SPNs) has been extended to enable mutual authentication across all protocols. Administators can now define their own SPNs. Thus SQL Server 2008 makes secure authentication...

In this post, I am trying to list out potential cause and general solution to this specific error when you are making connection to SQL Server 2005. First, It is due to TCP connection fail, since you can tell from the title, "TCP Provider: .xx", which...

This post focus on a typical cause of sql login failure issue described as the title. In real world, a customer log on to the machine as a domain\user or local machine accout, he can connec to SQL Server through SQL Server Management Studio. However...