The SQL Clinic is back this year at PASS Summit. This clinic has been a staple of the PASS Summit for years and is an easy way to get support on SQL and Azure Data Platform from CSS or the CAT team. Come to the clinic with your technical problems or questions...

As of September 1, 2013 we decided to remove SQLCAT.COM site and use MSDN as the primary vehicle to post new SQL Server content. This was done to minimize reader confusion and to streamline content publication. MSDN SQLCAT blogs already includes most...

As of September 1, 2013 we decided to remove SQLCAT.COM site and use MSDN as the primary vehicle to post new SQL Server content. This was done to minimize reader confusion and to streamline content publication. MSDN SQLCAT blogs already includes most...

As of September 1, 2013 we decided to remove SQLCAT.COM site and use MSDN as the primary vehicle to post new SQL Server content. This was done to minimize reader confusion and to streamline content publication. MSDN SQLCAT blogs already includes most...

As of September 1, 2013 we decided to remove SQLCAT.COM site and use MSDN as the primary vehicle to post new SQL Server content. This was done to minimize reader confusion and to streamline content publication. MSDN SQLCAT blogs already includes most...

Some great work is being done by the Windows Server and System Center CAT related to Hybrid Cloud and… Wait for it… Provisioning SQL Server as a Service! A snippet from the recent blog post Provisioning SQL Server as a Service with the...

In an effort to migrate as much content as possible from SQLCAT.com to the MSDN SQL CAT site we have consolidated all of the Whitepapers published over the last few years. While all of the content actually exists on Technet and MSDN download sites, SQLCAT...

Hello SQLCAT.COM friends: Thanks for your on-going support of SQLCAT.COM website for so many years. This is a very popular site for its deep practical content. However, MSDN also contains useful SQL Server content and a large number of users consider...

Are you interested in learning more about SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP (project codenamed Hekaton)? We have published an Internals Overview with some excellent details around the new technology with SQL Server 2014:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/5/0/F5096A71-3C31-4E9F-864E-A6D097A64805/SQL_Server_Hekaton_CTP1_White_Paper.pdf

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Authors : Silvano Coriani, Jasraj Dange, Ewan Fairweather, Xin Jin, Alexei Khalyako, Sanjay Mishra, Selcin Turkarslan Technical Reviewers : Mark Russinovich, Brad Calder, Andrew Edwards, Suraj Puri, Flavio Muratore, Hanuma Kodavalla, Madhan Arumugam...

One of the great enhancements in Microsoft's HDInsight distribution of Hadoop is the ability to store and access Hadoop data on an Azure Blob Store. We do this via the HDFS API extension called Azure Storage Vault (ASV). This allows you to persist data...

When I talk to people about adding self-service BI to their company's environment I generally get a list of reasons why it won't work. Some things I commonly hear: I can't get anyone in IT or on the business side to even try it. The business...

For my #SQLPASS Summit 2012 talk SQLCAT: Big Data – All Abuzz About Hive ( slides available to all | recording available to PASS Summit 2012 attendees ) I showed a mash-up of Hive, SQL Server, and Excel data that had been imported to PowerPivot...

A new version of the Partition Management Utility for SQL Server is now available on Codeplex at http://sqlpartitionmgmt.codeplex.com/ . This is a tool that helps you create necessary staging tables and indexes and associated check constraints, to support...

By: Nicholas Dritsas Reviewers: James Podgorski, Olivier Matrat, Sanjay Mishra Overview Azure’s Iaas VMs plus Virtual Networks can be used to configure easily a set of servers/VMs to host the main components of a BI solution. This process...

Author: Kevin Cox Contributors: Min He,Steve Lindell Reviewers: Sanjay Mishra, Juergen Thomas, Jimmy May Creating an availability group needs pings and status checks across the different servers involved. This accounts for approximately 500...

When using ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly to access a readable secondary via the Availability Group Listener, the login SIDs have to be the same between primary and secondary. The connection attempt generates an error saying the login does not exist. This...

Written by : Ed Katibah, Milan Stojic, Michael Rys, Nicholas Dritsas Technical reviewers : Chuck Heinzelman Introduction : Spatial Point Data queries require particular tuning efforts to enhance performance and improve overall application throughput...

The Technical Reference Guides for Designing Mission-Critical Solutions provide planning and architecture guidance for various mission-critical workloads deployed by users. These guides reflect the knowledge gained by the CAT team while working with customers...

We are proud to announce that the community technology preview (CTP) of Apache TM Hadoop TM -based Services for Windows Azure (or Hadoop on Azure) is now available. As noted in on the SQL Server Data Platform Insider blog, the CTP is by invite only http...

Author: Kun Cheng Reviewers: Shaun Tinline-Jones, Silvano Coriani, Steve Howard, Thomas Kejser, Sanjay Mishra A computed column is computed from an expression that can use other columns in the same table. The expression can be a noncomputed column...

Author: Thomas Kejser Contributors/Reviewers: Alexei Khalyako, Jerome Halmans, Fabricio Voznika, Sedat Yogurtcuoglu, Mike Ruthruff, Tobias Ternstrom and Steve Howard In this blog, I will explore ideas for extending SQL Server with new, fast hash functions...

As announced during the PASS Summit 2011 Day One Keynote , we are diving deeper into the world of Big Data by embracing and contributing to the open source community and Hadoop. We’ve had a lot of good coverage on this topic with some examples...

Author : Shaun Tinline-Jones Reviewers : Mike Ruthruff, Sanjay Mishra, Alexei Khalyako Not too long ago an ISV that developed solutions using SQL Server as the RDBMS, asked me how they could query a database as at a point in time. This was a relatively...

The SQLPASS 2011 summit is upon us again and all of our flocking to our fair city Seattle for our yearly technical-and-karoke fest! If you are up for some technical deep dives, here is the list PASS sessions presented by SQLCAT! And don’t forget...