Mathom Solutions Blog-IT

• Windows Disk Alignment - Creating new Aligned Volumes - How to get better I/O... - Disk, Alignment, Windows, Align, Sect | Tom Hirt @ TCPDump.com
  Tom Hirt gives some step by step process to align your disks (Windows 2003 and earlier) properly when they are presented to SQL Server.
  (tags: SQLServer Disk Alignment)

• PASS - The Professional Association for SQL Server > Learning Center > Top 10 Lists | SQLPass
  Late Nite TV does, it so why don't DBA's do it. Well they do. The folks over at PASS have come up with a great list of Top 10 for subjects such as Clustering, Profiler, Execution Plans, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Integration Services, Security,...you get the picture. It is thorough and will be expanding soon! Check it out and learn a little.
  (tags: sqlserver profiler ssrs ssas ssis security)

• In Recovery... | Turning off the ghost cleanup task for a performance gain | Paul Randal
  The master Paul Randal (blog | twitter) shows how to get a small performance boost on large systems with large delete patterns by removing the ghost cleanup process. Only use in special cases. On big systems, it's possible for the ghost cleanup process to fall behind and not catch up so you can use Trace Flag 661 to help it catch up.
  (tags: sqlserver performance sql2005 sql2008)

• CSS SQL Server Engineers : The SQL Server Wait Type Repository… | CSS SQL Server Engineers | Microsoft
  As part of Bob Ward's (twitter) talk at the 2009 US PASS Summit in Seattle called Inside SQL Server Wait Types, he has created this blog post as a reference point to find out information about wait types in SQL Server 2005 and 2008.  
  (tags: sqlserver wait_statistics)
• Kalen Delaney : Geek City: Exploring the Transaction Log Structure | Kalen Delaney
  Kalen (site) uses a table that can be created in the master database, and then populates it with the output of DBCC LOGINFO. Once you have captured all the rows from DBCC LOGINFO, you can query them using any TSQL queries.
  (tags: sqlserver DBCC transaction_log)
• Musings on Reporting Services and Notification Services : High Availability – Frequently Asked Questions about Failover Clustering and Reporting Services | Lukasz Pawlowski
  Lukasz (site) says that failover clustering with SSRS is possible, however there are a number of considerations and manual steps involved on your part. The documentation and links he provides proof that scaling out SSRS is your best option for achieving High Availability.
  (tags: sqlserver ssrs high_availability)
• Similiarities and differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server | Whitepaper | Microsoft
  SQL Azure Database is a cloud database service from Microsoft. It provides web-facing database functionality as a utility service. SQL Azure can provide many benefits, including rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability, and reduced management overhead. This Microsoft white paper provides an architectural overview of SQL Azure Database, and talks about how you can use augment your existing managed infrastructure.
  (tags: sqlserver Azure Whitepaper)
• Keep It Simple and Fast: Getting Started with SQL Azure, create your first SQL database in the cloud. | André van de Graaf
  Good step by step to getting started by Microsoft's SQL Azure platform.
  (tags: Azure)

• Carpe Datum | Buck Woody
  Buck Woody's (blog | twitter) awesome series of blog posts and links to better help you prepare for the 70-432 SQL 2008 Implementation and Maintenance certification.
  (tags: sql2008)
• Using a Certificate Signed Stored Procedure to Execute sp_send_dbmail - SQLServerCentral | Jonathan Kehayias
  Jonathan (blog | twitter) provides the best solution involving a certificate signed assembly to call sp_send_dbmail. This solution prevents one from adding users to msdb and the DatabaseMailUserRole.  It removes the risks associated with having TRUSTWORTHY ON setting enabled.
  (tags: sqlserver certificates security)
• Working with the New SQL Server 2008 Collations and Earlier Versions of the Native Data Provider - Whitepapers | Microsoft
  This Microsoft Whitepaper is on Microsoft SQL Server 2008's new Windows collations (denoted by *_100 in the collation name) that were added that make it in full alignment with the Windows Server 2008 operating systems.  (Authors:  Fernando Caro with technical review by immy Wu, Sanjay Mishra, Qingsong Yao, Juergen Thomas, Burzin Patel, Wanda He, and Tres London)
  (tags: sqlserver Unicode collations sql2008 Whitepaper)
• CSS SQL Server Engineers : How It Works: Are you handling cancels correctly in your SQLCLR code? | CSS SQL Server Engineers | Microsoft
  The CSS SQL Server Engineering team (blog | twitter) discusses that when a query is cancelled and it is currently executing in the SQLCLR that an System.Threading.ThreadAbortException exception is raised. It seems harmless enough to add a catch or finally block to your code to cleanup necessary resources. What they found is that it is not as easy as catching the ThreadAbort call. In some scenarios, the ThreadAbort is sometimes upgraded to a rude abort and the catch/finally block is not executed.
  (tags: sqlserver CLR Error_Trapping)
• Using Star Join and Few-Outer-Row Optimizations to Improve Data Warehousing Queries | Microsoft
  In this Microsoft white paper, there is a good discussions about two new features in Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Star Join and Few-Outer-Row optimizations. Microsoft tested the performance of SQL Server 2008 to highlight the effect of these two features and how they got a significant performance gain (about 75% gain and a reduction in the number of rows processed) over SQL Server 2005 without these two features.
  (tags: sqlserver performance datawarehouse star schema Whitepaper)

• SQL Server 2005 – How To Move 10 Millions Rows In 1 Millisecond | SQLServerPedia | Adam Haines
  Adam Haines (blog | Twitter) asks "How would you move 10 million rows?"  Traditionally, developers would use SELECT INTO or a INSERT INTO statement.  While this way accomplishes the task at hand, it is not nearly fast as using the SWITCH partitioning command.  It will save you tons of time!
  (tags: sqlserver performance SWITCH)

• Troubleshooting Microsoft SQL Server : Transactional Replication Conversations | ChrissK
  Chris K (blog) talks about when troubleshooting Transactional Replication performance he likes to break down the flow of data into 4 simultaneous conversations, examine performance of each conversation and this will help verify where the bottleneck investigation should begin.
  (tags: sql server Replication profiler)

As you know, I am a big fan of Free...here are some other goodies:

Engineering Software for Accessibility by Microsoft Press. In an effort to enable software developers to create accessible Windows applications, we wanted to share our process with the community. We have captured this engineering process in a new book, Engineering Software for Accessibility. The book addresses three basic questions:

1. How do you plan for accessibility?
2. How do you design your software for accessibility?
3. How can you implement and test to your software to confirm it meets the accessible design?

You will learn that properly implemented accessibility enables access to Windows applications for users with a variety of capabilities.  

Get it before it is gone!

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SQL Server Tacklebox by Rodney Landrum. Essential tools and scripts for the day-to-day DBA that helps with Scripts, tools and techniques to tackle SQL Server issues, Troubleshoot performance issues, Receive notifications of impending issues, Fight off data corruption, Document and report on your servers, Automate and standardize SQL Server installation, Migrate data and manage data growth, and Secure access to your servers.    

This is sponsored by Red-Gate Software.   

• Data Compression: Strategy, Capacity Planning and Best Practices | Microsoft
  The data compression feature in SQL Server 2008 helps compress the data and help reduce the size of the database. As well, because compressed data is stored in fewer pages, you get improved I/O performance for intensive workloads. However, it all comes at a cost, extra CPU resources are required on the server to compress and decompress the data. Therefore, it is important to understand the workload characteristics when deciding how to best implement compression.
  (tags: sqlserver sql2008 compression)