Recently one of our Data Warehouse SQL server instances started throwing a bunch of alerts (severity level: 20), the alert error message looked like this:

The client was unable to reuse a session with SPID [SPID], which had been reset for connection pooling. The failure ID is 29. This error may have been caused by an earlier operation failing

In this post I will go through the initial steps to diagnosing this issue, as well as introduce the new (SQL Server 2008+) Connectivity Ring Buffer feature, which lives in the sys.dm_os_ring_buffers DMV, and captures any server-side initiated SQL Server connection closures.

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PowerView (project name: Crescent) is one of the most anticipated reporting suites, bringing features that are long lacking from SSRS, such as hover-over effects, dynamic slicing and dicing of data, and generally interactive and visually striking reporting.

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A cheeky wee demo of SQL Server’s PowerPivot Excel Plugin, this introduction video quickly goes through how easy it is to connect to a data-source using PowerPivot, build the relationships between different tables, write a simple DAX query, and eventually use your newly created “mini” model in a Pivot Table with some vertical and horizontal sliders.

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This post describes an interesting situation were SQL Server locking might occur on a table that has not been indexed carefully, and how you can resolve this issue.

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SQL Server offers Full Text Search capabilities integrated within it’s framework, Full-Text Search offers very fast search capabilities over large text columns, along with advance search features such as Stemming or Thesaurus, as well as Infection (tense) Searches and Proximity Search, to name a few.

Out of the box, SQL Server’s FullText Search currently does not ship with a thesaurus for any language, here I present an English thesaurus that can be used to stem English language searches.

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