When building a Data Warehouse, we have to go through a “Data Discovery” phase where the requirements of the Business Intelligence solution are mapped to the actual operational systems so that we can extract transform and load (ETL) the data into the Data Warehouse. This is a significant effort, especially if you have multiple application […]

Most of my test servers are still 32-bit machines. It’s not until recently that I have started to use 64-bit machines for testing. The big reason for the 64-bit platform is better performance for large databases given that you can allocate up to 2TB of memory on these monster machines. Database servers love extra physical […]

A common question now is how does Microsoft license SQL Server in the Virtual environment? In the early days of Virtualization SQL Server was not an ideal candidate for consolidation due to the resource intensive nature of its processing. But now with the advent of superior Hardware and the support of Hyper-V and VMWare, many […]

One of the prime-time features of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 is provided by the “Project Gemini”  technology known as PowerPivot for  “Self Service BI”. Working with Office Excel 2010, data from multiple sources can be combined and analyzed together with the underlying complexities hidden from the analyst. Microsoft’s Business Intelligence tool-of-choice on the client-side […]

There has been no announcement from Microsoft on future releases of SQL Server beyond this year so we cannot predict accurately. We can speculate, however. The stated 3 year policy points to SQL Server 2011 but my sense is that would be too early after the newly release SQL Server 2008 R2. Shame as I was […]

SQL Server 2008 R2 is available and works with Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010. So why didn’t they just call it SQL Server 2010?  Yesterday’s USA Today posed the same question: “Microsoft marketing executives recently made a major gaffe by naming the newest version of its database server software SQL 2008 Revision 2 instead of […]

I have been testing out the latest SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP and been experimenting with the SQL Server Utility to perform multi-server management from a central server called a UCP. You can also monitor Data-tier applications and their activity on the database server. Visual Studio 2010 allows you to create a DAC (Data-tier Application […]

SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP (Community Technology Preview) is available for testing. The official release is slated for the Q2 of 2010. I am in the process of testing the new features.… The SQL Server 2008 R2 (version 10.50) contains multiple projects one of which was previously called Project Kilimanjaro and was first announced at […]