Archive for category: MS SQL Server

SSRS Report Execution Statistics and Analysis

13 Nov
November 13, 2011

Understanding and analyzing your SSRS report execution statistics is critical if you are serious about optimizing your SSRS reports, over the years working with SSRS I have found and developed a few procedures that are helpful in analyzing problematic report (in terms of execution time).

This post will go through some of the procedures you could use to look at your SSRS reports execution times.

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SSRS Execution Time Types and Optimization

13 Nov
November 13, 2011

Analyzing the performance of your SSRS reports in terms of execution and rendering time is crucial when trying to optimize your SSRS reports. Although SQL Server’s Reporting Service could be a bit of a black box sometimes, usually there are some back-end ways to accomplish most tasks.

This post will go through the SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS) Execution Types (stages), as well as some top line recommendations on how to optimize the time taken to execute each stage.

To get your SSRS reports execution statistics, you can check out my SSRS Report Execution Statistics and Analysis post.

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Change SQL Server Transaction Log or Data File Drive or Path

05 Nov
November 5, 2011

Sometimes you might need to re-organize your SQL server files around the server in order to improve I/O efficiency or simply because the current structure cannot coupe with the transaction log file or data file growth rate, and you need to expand onto other drives.

This post goes through how one might go about changing the SQL Server 2008 transaction log or data file location, commit this file move, and also diagnose and resolve any errors that could arise from performing such a move.

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SQL Server RPC Out on Linked Server Properties

22 Oct
October 22, 2011

You have probably reached this page after receiving the following error message: Server ‘SERVERNAME’ is not configured for RPC. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 7411). This article will explain why you are receiving this error, and what can you do resolve it.

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SQL Server Choosing Collation

22 Oct
October 22, 2011

your SQL Server Collation choice for your database (or server) will control how characters will be sorted and compared within the database or SQL Server in general.

DBAs must choose a collation carefully that matches the type of characters encountered in a particular database. It is important to take into account as well how this database will interact with other database in the same instances, or through a linked SQL Server instances.

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SSIS MULTIFLATFILE Connection Manager

22 Oct
October 22, 2011

Until recently I had no idea SSIS allowed opening multiple connections to (flat) files, but due to the performance and parallelism implication of such a connection, I thought its definitely worth blogging about.

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Troubleshooting a Large SQL Server Transaction Log File

07 Aug
August 7, 2011

Managing space on your SQL Server Transaction Log can sometimes be daunting, usually if you have a good backup strategy, and a well moderated database (in terms of monitoring and flagging long running transactions), then you will rarely run into unexpected large growth of your transaction log file. But in the real world this is rarely the case, and there will be occasions when you leave a very long transaction running over night (or days), or there is a schedule clash between two queries, or between a query and the backup schedule, which caused a failure in your log truncation strategy.

The daunting part is making sure that you recover from the situation with minimum data loss and disruption to the database’s recovery strategy. In this post I will go through the most common scenarios of transaction log growth, and how to resolve them.
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SSRS SSL Certificate Nightmare

28 Jun
June 28, 2011

I write this post after a hellish experience that lasted a couple of hours trying to sort out the SSL certificate for SSRS.
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SQL Server Graphical Execution Plan Icons Walkthrough Part 1 – Lookup Operations

26 Jun
June 26, 2011

SQL Server’s Graphical Execution Plan contains a wealth of information that could be used to diagnose performance and maintenance (such as out of date statistics) issues.

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List of all SQL Server DMVs & System Objects

26 Jun
June 26, 2011

As you probably already know, SQL Server has many DMVs (Dynamic Management Views) and System Objects that helps DBAs, these include performance counters, index statistics, resource locking information, user object IDs and many more.

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