SQL Server in Cloud
Hi
We have an sql server in cloud and two app servers which connect to an application in the sql server using ODBC. The operations take long time to execute. The same save sequence which takes 11 seconds in the SQL server (when working in the SQL
server itself) takes 50 seconds when running from application server.
We are using remote desktop to connect to the app server and the sql servers
The sql server is 2008 R2
Thanks for all the help
Regards
Biju
Hi,
According to your description, did you mean that you have created a SQL server and two App servers on Windows azure VMs? If yes, sorry to say that it's not the correct forum for troubleshooting this kind of issue and I will move it to Windows
Azure Virtual Machine forum.
In addition, to connect to SQL Azure, an ODBC driver must support SQL Server Authentication and Secure Sockets Layer encryption. That is to say the SQL server will perform authentication, maybe it would waste some time during the authentication process.
Best regards,
Susie
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Increase Performance and ROI for SQL Server Environments
May 2015
Explore
The Buzz from Microsoft Ignite 2015
NetApp was in full force at the recent Microsoft Ignite show in Chicago, talking about solutions for hybrid cloud, and our proven solutions for Microsoft SQL Server and other Microsoft applications.
Hot topics at the NetApp booth included:
OnCommand® Shift. A revolutionary technology that lets you move virtual machines back and forth between VMware and Hyper-V environments in minutes.
Azure Site Recovery to NetApp Private Storage. Replicate on-premises SAN-based applications to NPS for disaster recovery in the Azure cloud.
These tools give you greater flexibility for managing and protecting important business applications.
Chris Lemmons
Director, EIS Technical Marketing, NetApp
If your organization runs databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle DB, you probably know that these vendors primarily license their products on a "per-core" basis. Microsoft recently switched to "per-core" rather than "per-socket" licensing for SQL Server 2012 and 2014. This change can have a big impact on the total cost of operating a database, especially as core counts on new servers continue to climb. It turns out that the right storage infrastructure can drive down database costs, increase productivity, and put your infrastructure back in balance.
In many customer environments, NetApp has noticed that server CPU utilization is low—often on the order of just 20%. This is usually the result of I/O bottlenecks. Server cores have to sit and wait for I/O from hard disk drives (HDDs). We've been closely studying the impact of all-flash storage on SQL Server environments that use HDD-based storage systems. NetApp® All Flash FAS platform delivers world-class performance for SQL Server plus the storage efficiency, application integration, nondisruptive operations, and data protection of clustered Data ONTAP®, making it ideal for SQL Server environments.
Tests show that All Flash FAS can drive up IOPS and database server CPU utilization by as much as 4x. And with a 95% reduction in latency, you can achieve this level of performance with half as many servers. This reduces the number of servers you need and the number of cores you have to license, driving down costs by 50% or more and paying back your investment in flash in as little as six months.
Figure 1) NetApp All Flash FAS increases CPU utilization on your SQL Server database servers, lowering costs.
Source: NetApp, 2015
Whether you're running one of the newer versions of SQL Server or facing an upgrade of an earlier version, you can't afford not to take a second look at your storage environment.
End of Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is Rapidly Approaching
Microsoft has set the end of extended support for SQL Server 2005 for April 2016—less than a year away. With support for Microsoft Windows 2003 ending in July 2015, time may already be running short.
If you're running Windows Server 2003, new server hardware is almost certainly needed when you upgrade SQL Server. Evaluate your server and storage options now to get costs under control.
Test Methodology
To test the impact of flash on SQL Server performance, we replaced a legacy HDD-based storage system with an All Flash FAS AFF8080 EX. The legacy system was configured with almost 150 HDDs, a typical configuration for HDD storage supporting SQL Server. The AFF8080 EX used just 48 SSDs.
Table 1) Components used in testing.
Test Configuration Components
Details
SQL Server 2014 servers
Fujitsu RX300
Server operating system
Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 Standard Edition
SQL Server database version
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition
Processors per server
2 6-core Xeon E5-2630 at 2.30 GHz
Fibre channel network
8Gb FC with multipathing
Storage controller
AFF8080 EX
Data ONTAP version
Clustered Data ONTAP® 8.3.1
Drive number and type
48 SSD
Source: NetApp, 2015
The test configuration consisted of 10 database servers connected through fibre channel to both the legacy storage system and the AFF8080 EX. Each of the 10 servers ran SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition.
The publicly available HammerDB workload generator was used to drive an OLTP-like workload simultaneously from each of the 10 database servers to storage. We first directed the workload to the legacy storage array to establish a baseline, increasing the load to the point where read latency consistently exceeded 20ms.
That workload was then directed at the AFF8080 EX. The change in storage resulted in an overall 20x reduction in read latency, a greater than 4x improvement in IOPS, and a greater than 4x improvement in database server CPU utilization.
Figure 2) NetApp All Flash FAS increases IOPS and server CPU utilization and lowers latency.
Source: NetApp, 2015
In other words, the database servers are able to process four times as many IOPS with dramatically lower latency. CPU utilization goes up accordingly because the servers are processing 4x the work per unit time.
The All Flash FAS system still had additional headroom under this load.
Calculating the Savings
Let's look at what this performance improvement means for the total cost of running SQL Server 2014 over a 3-year period. To do the analysis we used NetApp Realize, a storage modeling and financial analysis tool designed to help quantify the value of NetApp solutions and products. NetApp sales teams and partners use this tool to assist with return on investment (ROI) calculations.
The calculation includes the cost of the AFF8080 EX, eliminates the costs associated with the existing storage system, and cuts the total number of database servers from 10 to five. This reduces SQL Server licensing costs by 50%. The same workload was run with five servers and achieved the same results. ROI analysis is summarized in Table 2.
Table 2) ROI from replacing an HDD-based storage system with All Flash FAS, thereby cutting server and licensing costs in half.
Value
Analysis Results
ROI
65%
Net present value (NPV)
$950,000
Payback period
six months
Total cost reduction
More than $1 million saved over a 3-year analysis period compared to the legacy storage system
Savings on power, space, and administration
$40,000
Additional savings due to nondisruptive operations benefits (not included in ROI)
$90,000
Source: NetApp, 2015
The takeaway here is that you can replace your existing storage with All Flash FAS and get a big performance bump while substantially reducing your costs, with the majority of the savings derived from the reduction in SQL Server licensing costs.
Replace your existing storage with All Flash FAS and get a big performance bump while substantially reducing your costs.
Maximum SQL Server 2014 Performance
In addition to the ROI analysis, we also measured the maximum performance of the AFF8080 EX with SQL Server 2014. A load-generation tool was used to simulate an industry-standard TPC-E OLTP workload against an SQL Server 2014 test configuration.
A two-node AFF8080 EX achieved a maximum throughput of 322K IOPS at just over 1ms latency. For all points other than the maximum load point, latency was consistently under 1ms and remained under 0.8ms up to 180K IOPS.
Data Reduction and Storage Efficiency
In addition to performance testing, we looked at the overall storage efficiency savings of our SQL Server database implementation. The degree of compression that can be achieved is dependent on the actual data that is written and stored in the database. For this environment, inline compression was effective. Deduplication, as is often the case in database environments, provided little additional storage savings and was not enabled.
For the test data used in the maximum performance test, we measured a compression ratio of 1.5:1. We also tested inline compression on a production SQL Server 2014 data set to further validate these results and saw a 1.8:1 compression ratio.
Space-efficient NetApp Snapshot® copies provide additional storage efficiency benefits for database environments. Unlike snapshot methods that use copy-on-write, there is no performance penalty; unlike full mirror copies, NetApp Snapshot copies use storage space sparingly. Snapshot copies only consume a small amount of storage space for metadata and additional incremental space is consumed as block-level changes occur. In a typical real-world SQL Server deployment on NetApp storage, database volume Snapshot copies are made every two hours.
First introduced more than 10 years ago, NetApp FlexClone® technology also plays an important role in SQL Server environments. Clones are fully writable, and, similar to Snapshot copies, only consume incremental storage capacity. With FlexClone, you can create as many copies of production data as you need for development and test, reporting, and so on. Cloning is a great way to support the development and test work needed when upgrading from an earlier version of SQL Server. You'll sometimes see these types of capabilities referred to as "copy data management."
A Better Way to Run Enterprise Applications
The performance benefits that all-flash storage can deliver for database environments are significant: more IOPS, lower latency, and an end to near-constant performance tuning.
If you think the performance acceleration that comes with all-flash storage is cost prohibitive, think again. All Flash FAS doesn't just deliver a performance boost, it changes the economics of your operations, paying for itself with thousands in savings on licensing and server costs. In terms of dollars per IOPS, All Flash FAS is extremely economical relative to HDD.
And, because All Flash FAS runs NetApp clustered Data ONTAP, it delivers the most complete environment to support SQL Server and all your enterprise applications with capabilities that include comprehensive storage efficiency, integrated data protection, and deep integration for your applications.
For complete details on this testing look for NetApp TR-4303, which will be available in a few weeks. Stay tuned to Tech OnTap for more information as NetApp continues to run benchmarks with important server workloads including Oracle DB and server virtualization.
Learn more about NetApp solutions for SQL Server and NetApp All-flash solutions.
Quick Links
Tech OnTap Community
Archive
PDFMay 2015
Explore
The Buzz from Microsoft Ignite 2015
NetApp was in full force at the recent Microsoft Ignite show in Chicago, talking about solutions for hybrid cloud, and our proven solutions for Microsoft SQL Server and other Microsoft applications.
Hot topics at the NetApp booth included:
OnCommand® Shift. A revolutionary technology that lets you move virtual machines back and forth between VMware and Hyper-V environments in minutes.
Azure Site Recovery to NetApp Private Storage. Replicate on-premises SAN-based applications to NPS for disaster recovery in the Azure cloud.
These tools give you greater flexibility for managing and protecting important business applications.
Chris Lemmons
Director, EIS Technical Marketing, NetApp
If your organization runs databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle DB, you probably know that these vendors primarily license their products on a "per-core" basis. Microsoft recently switched to "per-core" rather than "per-socket" licensing for SQL Server 2012 and 2014. This change can have a big impact on the total cost of operating a database, especially as core counts on new servers continue to climb. It turns out that the right storage infrastructure can drive down database costs, increase productivity, and put your infrastructure back in balance.
In many customer environments, NetApp has noticed that server CPU utilization is low—often on the order of just 20%. This is usually the result of I/O bottlenecks. Server cores have to sit and wait for I/O from hard disk drives (HDDs). We've been closely studying the impact of all-flash storage on SQL Server environments that use HDD-based storage systems. NetApp® All Flash FAS platform delivers world-class performance for SQL Server plus the storage efficiency, application integration, nondisruptive operations, and data protection of clustered Data ONTAP®, making it ideal for SQL Server environments.
Tests show that All Flash FAS can drive up IOPS and database server CPU utilization by as much as 4x. And with a 95% reduction in latency, you can achieve this level of performance with half as many servers. This reduces the number of servers you need and the number of cores you have to license, driving down costs by 50% or more and paying back your investment in flash in as little as six months.
Figure 1) NetApp All Flash FAS increases CPU utilization on your SQL Server database servers, lowering costs.
Source: NetApp, 2015
Whether you're running one of the newer versions of SQL Server or facing an upgrade of an earlier version, you can't afford not to take a second look at your storage environment.
End of Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is Rapidly Approaching
Microsoft has set the end of extended support for SQL Server 2005 for April 2016—less than a year away. With support for Microsoft Windows 2003 ending in July 2015, time may already be running short.
If you're running Windows Server 2003, new server hardware is almost certainly needed when you upgrade SQL Server. Evaluate your server and storage options now to get costs under control.
Test Methodology
To test the impact of flash on SQL Server performance, we replaced a legacy HDD-based storage system with an All Flash FAS AFF8080 EX. The legacy system was configured with almost 150 HDDs, a typical configuration for HDD storage supporting SQL Server. The AFF8080 EX used just 48 SSDs.
Table 1) Components used in testing.
Test Configuration Components
Details
SQL Server 2014 servers
Fujitsu RX300
Server operating system
Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 Standard Edition
SQL Server database version
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition
Processors per server
2 6-core Xeon E5-2630 at 2.30 GHz
Fibre channel network
8Gb FC with multipathing
Storage controller
AFF8080 EX
Data ONTAP version
Clustered Data ONTAP® 8.3.1
Drive number and type
48 SSD
Source: NetApp, 2015
The test configuration consisted of 10 database servers connected through fibre channel to both the legacy storage system and the AFF8080 EX. Each of the 10 servers ran SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition.
The publicly available HammerDB workload generator was used to drive an OLTP-like workload simultaneously from each of the 10 database servers to storage. We first directed the workload to the legacy storage array to establish a baseline, increasing the load to the point where read latency consistently exceeded 20ms.
That workload was then directed at the AFF8080 EX. The change in storage resulted in an overall 20x reduction in read latency, a greater than 4x improvement in IOPS, and a greater than 4x improvement in database server CPU utilization.
Figure 2) NetApp All Flash FAS increases IOPS and server CPU utilization and lowers latency.
Source: NetApp, 2015
In other words, the database servers are able to process four times as many IOPS with dramatically lower latency. CPU utilization goes up accordingly because the servers are processing 4x the work per unit time.
The All Flash FAS system still had additional headroom under this load.
Calculating the Savings
Let's look at what this performance improvement means for the total cost of running SQL Server 2014 over a 3-year period. To do the analysis we used NetApp Realize, a storage modeling and financial analysis tool designed to help quantify the value of NetApp solutions and products. NetApp sales teams and partners use this tool to assist with return on investment (ROI) calculations.
The calculation includes the cost of the AFF8080 EX, eliminates the costs associated with the existing storage system, and cuts the total number of database servers from 10 to five. This reduces SQL Server licensing costs by 50%. The same workload was run with five servers and achieved the same results. ROI analysis is summarized in Table 2.
Table 2) ROI from replacing an HDD-based storage system with All Flash FAS, thereby cutting server and licensing costs in half.
Value
Analysis Results
ROI
65%
Net present value (NPV)
$950,000
Payback period
six months
Total cost reduction
More than $1 million saved over a 3-year analysis period compared to the legacy storage system
Savings on power, space, and administration
$40,000
Additional savings due to nondisruptive operations benefits (not included in ROI)
$90,000
Source: NetApp, 2015
The takeaway here is that you can replace your existing storage with All Flash FAS and get a big performance bump while substantially reducing your costs, with the majority of the savings derived from the reduction in SQL Server licensing costs.
Replace your existing storage with All Flash FAS and get a big performance bump while substantially reducing your costs.
Maximum SQL Server 2014 Performance
In addition to the ROI analysis, we also measured the maximum performance of the AFF8080 EX with SQL Server 2014. A load-generation tool was used to simulate an industry-standard TPC-E OLTP workload against an SQL Server 2014 test configuration.
A two-node AFF8080 EX achieved a maximum throughput of 322K IOPS at just over 1ms latency. For all points other than the maximum load point, latency was consistently under 1ms and remained under 0.8ms up to 180K IOPS.
Data Reduction and Storage Efficiency
In addition to performance testing, we looked at the overall storage efficiency savings of our SQL Server database implementation. The degree of compression that can be achieved is dependent on the actual data that is written and stored in the database. For this environment, inline compression was effective. Deduplication, as is often the case in database environments, provided little additional storage savings and was not enabled.
For the test data used in the maximum performance test, we measured a compression ratio of 1.5:1. We also tested inline compression on a production SQL Server 2014 data set to further validate these results and saw a 1.8:1 compression ratio.
Space-efficient NetApp Snapshot® copies provide additional storage efficiency benefits for database environments. Unlike snapshot methods that use copy-on-write, there is no performance penalty; unlike full mirror copies, NetApp Snapshot copies use storage space sparingly. Snapshot copies only consume a small amount of storage space for metadata and additional incremental space is consumed as block-level changes occur. In a typical real-world SQL Server deployment on NetApp storage, database volume Snapshot copies are made every two hours.
First introduced more than 10 years ago, NetApp FlexClone® technology also plays an important role in SQL Server environments. Clones are fully writable, and, similar to Snapshot copies, only consume incremental storage capacity. With FlexClone, you can create as many copies of production data as you need for development and test, reporting, and so on. Cloning is a great way to support the development and test work needed when upgrading from an earlier version of SQL Server. You'll sometimes see these types of capabilities referred to as "copy data management."
A Better Way to Run Enterprise Applications
The performance benefits that all-flash storage can deliver for database environments are significant: more IOPS, lower latency, and an end to near-constant performance tuning.
If you think the performance acceleration that comes with all-flash storage is cost prohibitive, think again. All Flash FAS doesn't just deliver a performance boost, it changes the economics of your operations, paying for itself with thousands in savings on licensing and server costs. In terms of dollars per IOPS, All Flash FAS is extremely economical relative to HDD.
And, because All Flash FAS runs NetApp clustered Data ONTAP, it delivers the most complete environment to support SQL Server and all your enterprise applications with capabilities that include comprehensive storage efficiency, integrated data protection, and deep integration for your applications.
For complete details on this testing look for NetApp TR-4303, which will be available in a few weeks. Stay tuned to Tech OnTap for more information as NetApp continues to run benchmarks with important server workloads including Oracle DB and server virtualization.
Learn more about NetApp solutions for SQL Server and NetApp All-flash solutions.
Quick Links
Tech OnTap Community
Archive
PDF -
SQL Server TechNet Guru News: October Winners Announced
All the votes are in!
And below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, October 2014 !!!!
For a full list of winners,
see the full blog post, as runners up had to be removed from this post to fit the forum max length restrictions.
BizTalk Technical Guru - October 2014
Agustín Mántaras
Visual Basic script to deal with BizTalk Suspended Messages
Mandi Ohlinger: "A quick and easy way to handle suspended messages. I'm a fan!"
Ed Price: "Great article! Thanks for including an MSDN Gallery link, a See Also section that links to the Wiki portal, and some great example snippets!"
Sandro Pereira: "Nice script, in my opinion it will be best to write this in PowerShell script. Well written, well formatted (some minor improvements can be made)"
Johns-305 [boatseller]
BizTalk: EDI Features Not Just For HIPAA
Mandi Ohlinger: "A great walkthrough including the screen shots. Nice addition to the Wiki. "
Ed Price: "Good use of images and color in the code snippets!"
Sandro Pereira: "Nice start be this article should be explained better. Article format can be improved."
Steef-Jan Wiggers
Securing BizTalk endpoints leveraging Sentinet API Management Part 3
Sandro Pereira: "Another excellent article in this series on Sentinet API Management. Well written, well formatted with nice pictures, great article and I love the topic."
Ed Price: "Fantastic depth on this article!"
Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - October 2014
Wim Beck
Event Driven Scheduling of Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) using a Windows Service
Ed Price: "Fantastic job on formatting, the code, and all the explanations! The TOC and References are a nice touch!"
PG: "Nice innovative solution, that is a nice add-on to existing solutions. "
Microsoft Azure Technical Guru - October 2014
Chervine
Creating and Querying Microsoft Azure DocumentDB
JH: "DocumentDB is one of my favorite new services on Azure. It's cool to see that someone seems to be excited as I am. Hope that this article is just the beginning of a whole series about Azure DocumentDB."
Ed Price: "Great use of images and code snippets. Good conclusion! Great topic!"
Chilbeto
Publishing Multiple Azure Environments
TN: "Great "
JH: "This topic is normally forgotten when talking about Cloud development. I had a hard time to find an appropriate mechanism myself. This article provides one of the better ways how you can deploy multiple environments to Azure."
Ed Price: "Great overview article. Good diagram at the top! Could benefit from a TOC and References. Good job on the conclusion!"
saramgsilva
Microsoft's Windows AppStudio: Add Support For Push Notification
Ed Price: "Great introduction and incredibly thorough. Great job!"
JH: "A new article about AppStudio focusing on push notifications. Push notifications in my opinion, when done right, makes an app alive. Would love to see a complete example with all features mentioned in the related articles published
on GitHub."
Microsoft Visio Technical Guru - October 2014
Mr X
Unattended installation of Visio 2013
Ed Price: "Great job, Mr X! Good use of images!"
AH: "It gives good instructions with the help of the pictures but its still missing detailed information if some user needs it. Need to provide a wiki/msdn references that are available something like http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179097.aspx.
Overall decent article"
Miscellaneous Technical Guru - October 2014
Brian Nadjiwon
How to Create and Use Classes in PowerShell
Richard Mueller: "Very interesting concepts. It would help to name the objects something like "Jim" rather than "Person", for example. There should be a See Also section, and more links to references."
Ed Price: "Great topic and explanations of the classes!"
Andy ONeill
Visual Studio: Snippetty Tip
Richard Mueller: "Great idea with some good advise."
Ed Price: "Great explanations of the code snippets! Fun topic! As is mentioned in the comments and in the article, many people don't know this is possible!"
saramgsilva
How to create a Virtual Machine for run Windows 10 Technical Preview
Ed Price: "Fantastic topic! Good use of images!"
Richard Mueller: "Good images and a good step by step explanation. Needs links to references and other Wiki articles (See Also). We should try not to use first person."
SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - October 2014
Geetanjali Arora
SharePoint Online : An Introduction to Office Delve
TN: "Great wrap-up about Delve"
Ed Price: "Amazing depth and a great overview to a new topic! Great job on the images and details!"
GO: "woohooo; a DELVE article. Great work."
Margriet Bruggeman: "A new topic explained well, I was actually looking for this info!"
Jinchun Chen: "Great."
Steven Andrews
Building a list specific search with JavaScript
TN: "Great tip for mid-dev"
Ed Price: "Great job on the descriptions, formatting, images, and See Also section! Check out the great comment from Dan at the bottom of the article!"
GO: "Nice work Steven. It's definitely a great article.!"
Margriet Bruggeman: "Great! easy to use solution for a request that is made often"
Jinchun Chen: "Nice work"
Dan Christian
No-code solution to lookup previous item in a list
Ed Price: "Effective images and helpful video and See Also help round out this great article!"
GO: "Thanks Dan and as USUAL an usefull article."
Jinchun Chen: "Nice. If InfoPath Form is accepted, we can use InfoPath Form to achive the goal as well."
Margriet Bruggeman: "I can tell that effort is taken to explain the idea well"
Small Basic Technical Guru - October 2014
Nonki Takahashi
Small Basic: Rotation Centers for Shapes of Triangle and Line
RZ: "Excellent article. This is a must read if you want to make an object move. You need to understand the coordinates and the rotation center."
Ed Price: "Great use of images!"
Nonki Takahashi
Small Basic Known Issue: 26992 -
GraphicsWindow.GetPixel(X, Y) Doesn’t Work Properly If X Or Y Has after the Decimal Point in Remote
Ed Price: "Good recommended workaround!"
RZ: "Yeah, another bug in Small Basic that might get you and need to be fixed :)"
Nonki Takahashi
Small Basic: International Resources
Ed Price: "Oh, yeah. This one is so amazing! Thank you for making this and organizing the resources so well!"
SQL BI and Power BI Technical Guru - October 2014
Visakh16
Random SSRS Musings 1 : Rowset Concatenation Using Native SSRS Expressions
MR: "Interesting example of LookupSet function usage"
RB: "merging columns on a single line with an interesting solution"
Jinchun Chen: "Good workaround we are generally using."
Ed Price: "Great descriptions and use of images!"
Jan D'Hondt
Dates in Excel files rendered from reports are displayed as plain numbers
Ed Price: "Great job laying out the sections. The images help convey a lot!"
MR: "Very short tip that could be useful because of different behavior on iPad and Windows"
RB: "interesting work-around."
Anushka Weerakkodyge
Integrating Power View with SharePoint Server 2010/2013 - Multidimensional Mode
RB: "nice walkthrough"
Ed Price: "Great depth in the procedure steps! It's similar to another article (see comment), but it's still a good addition. Good use of images!"
MR: "This article explains how to install Power View on SharePoint but do not explain that Reporting Services is the tool required for Power View to work - the initial setup is required only whether SSRS has not been installed before.
Otherwise, it has to be upgraded and then the shortcut can work."
SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - October 2014
Shanky
In depth Look at What can Cause Index to be Still Fragmented After Rebuild
AM: "Well covered."
Ed Price: "Good job on the explanations, Conclusion, and See Also section!"
Ronen Ariely
Representing list of values using a single value
Ed Price: "Great breakdown of sections! Good formatting on the sections and code snippets! Great interactions in the comments!"
AM: " Interesting options and walk through."
Visakh16
Generate Scripts for Stored Procedures Without Dynamic SQL in SSMS
AM: "Nice tip for better use of SSMS."
Ed Price: "Great breakdown of the problem and solution. As Saeid wrote in the comments, "Clear article which shows handy solution!" Good job!"
System Center Technical Guru - October 2014
Alan do Nascimento Carlos
ALM and IT Operations - Management 360 with System Center Operations Manager
in 06 Steps
Ed Price: "Lots of images. Great job breaking up the steps! Could benefit from a TOC and References. Great article!"
GO: "Thanks for the only article. great btw. :-)"
Transact-SQL Technical Guru - October 2014
Visakh16
Behavioral Difference of IIf Function in T-SQL Compared To SSRS
Richard Mueller: "Nicely done with code examples. The "See Also" section should only link to Wiki articles."
GO: "Wonderfull article thank you!"
Jinchun Chen: "Interesting comparison "
Ed Price: "Good topic. Very clean and clear. Great article!"
JS: "Good writeup, though I would bring the comparison with the table to the top and reference the samples from there."
Ronen Ariely
INSTEAD OF Triggers
Ed Price: "Good depth here. Great explanations of the code! Great job interacting in the comments and improving the article!"
JS: "Use object qualifiers (schema name to make sure that the right objects will be picked, e.g. dbo.) Outline ab bot more the things what not to do in production! Be aware that although people read this, they tend to use it anyway. If
triggers are enabled, they are executed once for each batch They are executed each statement not batch, miswording here."
Richard Mueller: "Good article. The "See Also" should only include Wiki articles. Some of the "Resources" could be moved to "See Also". Grammar needs work."
GO: "Thanks"
Praveen Rayan D'sa
Find the Database where user defined object located and where it is being referred.
GO: "This article deserves absolutely a medal THANKS!"
Jinchun Chen: ""
Richard Mueller: "Good topic. Grammar needs work. "Caution" states undocumented stored procedure is safe for production, but later states it is not."
Ed Price: "Great article. We should include the technology in the title. Good descriptions, and great References!"
JS: "Although the outlined solution is interesting and shows the public the usage of the "new" system views finding the right dependencies, it is not recommended to describe the usage of undocumented features such as sp_msforeachdb
as there are alternatives, especially in this scenario. You could generate a query using the sys.databases view and let it print out the database name along with the use statement. In addition to this and as the statement has to be run with a high privileged
account as schema information is secured as well, it should be made safe to SQL injection. In many case in the statements there is just a concatentation of values used. You can easily inject code in here, Also make sure that names / object identifiers are
quoted with [] in order to allow also special characters like spaces in the names"
Visual Basic Technical Guru - October 2014
.paul.
Image balloonTips
Richard Mueller: "Lots of code. Great idea. The "See Also" section should only include links to Wiki articles."
Ed Price: "Great solution. Good explanations!"
.paul.
Image Arrow Pointers
Richard Mueller: "Interesting idea. Need more links. Don't use first person."
Ed Price: "Creative solution! It would be good to break up the code more, to explain it. Great article!"
Paul Ishak
Visual Basic Graphics Frame Class (Easily Converted to C#)
Ed Price: "Good solution! Could benefit from more explanations of what the code is doing."
Richard Mueller: "Don't use first person. Could use more description, explanation, and links."
Visual C# Technical Guru - October 2014
Chervine
Using XML Serialization with C# and SQL Server
Ed Price: "It goes on for quite a while! Great job breaking out all the code snippets and explaining them well! Could benefit from a References or See Also section. Great TOC!"
Søren Granfeldt: "In these days of generic data, this serves as a good example of storing unstructured data"
Margriet Bruggeman: "Through discussion of the topic"
DB: "Interesting"
Magnus (MM8)
C#: Generic Type Parameters And Dynamic Types
Søren Granfeldt: "Nice example of diving into generic code and extensibility"
DB: "Good walkthrough of generics and reflection"
Ed Price: "Important topic! Great descriptions."
Margriet Bruggeman: "Good, I like the way the article covers various sides of the problem"
saramgsilva
File exporter for IEnumerable of T
Ed Price: "Another great article from Sara! Great job on the TOC and code snippets!"
Søren Granfeldt: "Great idea; could use a little more generic approach on the formatting of values"
Margriet Bruggeman: "Nice example of applying generics"
Wiki and Portals Technical Guru - October 2014
Durval Ramos
Summit: Principles of International TNWiki Summit
Richard Mueller: "A great writeup and introduction to this fantastic idea. Well done."
Ed Price: "Great depth and planning for this event!"
GO: "This is one of the best Portals that I've ever seen! Thanks"
Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps Technical Guru - October 2014
saramgsilva
How to Integrate Cortana in the Menu App
JH: "I got three words for you: I love Cortana! This article shows nicely how to integrate Cortana into your own app. Would love to see more."
Ed Price: "That's what I'm talking about! Way to go for a "What's Next" topic and nail it! I expect this article to gain a lot of interest. Fantastic article!"
Carmelo La Monica
The class GeocodeQuery in Windows Phone 8.
JH: "Lots of code examples about a feature some apps should be use more. Geocoding becomes more and more important, so this article fits perfectly into this."
Ed Price: "This is an important class with a lot of possibilities. Great execution on this article! Could benefit from a References or Additional Resources section. Good job wrapping it up with the conclusion."
saramgsilva
Export To CSV for Windows Store apps
JH: "Most people laugh when they hear about CSV export of data. A database would be a better place for the data of an app. In my opinion this is not always true (because CSV is small and can be used in different ways),
so most apps should have the capability to export data into the CSV file format. This article shows how this can be done."
Ed Price: "Another very important article. I love the Source link to the MSDN Gallery. Great job!"
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Technical Guru - October 2014
Andy ONeill
WPF: Entity Framework MVVM Walk Through 1
Ed Price: "Very well formatted, clear sections, and lots of depth and clear explanations! The TOC, code snippets, Summary, and Further Reading links all help round out this great article!"
KJ: "awesome"
saramgsilva
How to binding a ResourceDictionary to a Lisbox in apps based in XAML
Ed Price: "Incredibly clear and fantastic topic! The TOC and Source link to the Gallery item help provide more value!"
GO: "She did it again. Great article."
Shweta Lodha
PopUps with Interactivity [Prism 5.0]
KJ: "handy"
Ed Price: "Good clarity and use of code snippets and images. Could benefit from a TOC and References/See Also. Great job!"
GO: "Layout could be better, but still valualble article."
Windows Server Technical Guru - October 2014
Richard Mueller
Active Directory: Generalized-Time Attributes
Mark Parris: "Very detailed article providing very good information."
GO: "Top 1 AD article Thanks Richard."
JM: "This is an excellent article, thanks for your contribution."
Philippe Levesque: "Good article ! I really liked the note about the whenChanged"
Darshana Jayathilake
Some useful features with Windows Group policies
JM: "This is an excellent article, but I recommend making the title more accurate by renaming it something like "How to configure Applocker using Group Policy" "
GO: "I like the article; so great written"
Mark Parris: "A good insight on some GPO settings and their capability."
Philippe Levesque: "Good visual howto !"
Mr X
How to manage Windows Taskbar Items pinning using Group Policy
Philippe Levesque: "Good subject well explained, already seen users that ask for that in the forum as it's new."
JM: "This is a good article that would be much more useful if you specify the Windows versions to which the article applies."
GO: "Merci, Mr X"
Mark Parris: "Very useful, especially if you need to utilise this capability post deployment."
-------------------------------- 8< --------------------------------
A huge thank you to EVERYONE who contributed an article to October's competition.
Hopefully we will see you ALL again in
November 2014's listings?
If you haven't contributed an article for this month, and you think you can create a more useful, clever and better presented wiki article than the winners above, here's
your chance! :D
Best regards,
Pete Laker
More about the TechNet Guru Awards:
TechNet Guru Competitions
#PEJL
Got any nice code? If you invest time in coding an elegant, novel or impressive answer on MSDN forums, why not copy it over to
TechNet Wiki, for future generations to benefit from! You'll never get archived again, and
you could win weekly awards!
Have you got what it takes o become this month's
TechNet Technical Guru? Join a long list of well known community big hitters, show your knowledge and prowess in your favoured technologies!Congrats to Shanky, Ronen, and Visakh!
SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - October 2014
Shanky
In depth Look at What can Cause Index to be Still Fragmented After Rebuild
AM: "Well covered."
Ed Price: "Good job on the explanations, Conclusion, and See Also section!"
Ronen Ariely
Representing list of values using a single value
Ed Price: "Great breakdown of sections! Good formatting on the sections and code snippets! Great interactions in the comments!"
AM: " Interesting options and walk through."
Visakh16
Generate Scripts for Stored Procedures Without Dynamic SQL in SSMS
AM: "Nice tip for better use of SSMS."
Ed Price: "Great breakdown of the problem and solution. As Saeid wrote in the comments, "Clear article which shows handy solution!" Good job!"
Ed Price, Azure & Power BI Customer Program Manager (Blog,
Small Basic,
Wiki Ninjas,
Wiki)
Answer an interesting question?
Create a wiki article about it! -
Calling all SQL Server users! May TechNet Gurus announced!
The results for May's
TechNet Guru competition have been posted!
http://blogs.technet.com/b/wikininjas/archive/2014/01/16/technet-guru-awards-december-2013.aspx
Congratulations to all our new Gurus for May!
We will be interviewing some of the winners and highlighting their achievements, as the month unfolds.
Post your JUNE contributions here:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/24692.technet-guru-contributions-for-june-2014.aspx
Read all about June's competition, hopefully in a stickied post, at the top of this forum.
Below is a summary of the medal winners for May. The last column being a few of the comments from the judges.
Unfortunately, runners up and their judge feedback comments had to be trimmed from THIS post, to fit into the forum's 60,000 character limit, however
the full version is available on TechNet Wiki.
Some articles only just missed out, so we may be returning to discuss those too, in future blogs.
BizTalk Technical Guru - May 2014
Peter Lindgren
BizTalk 2010: Call SSO from Orchestration
TGN: "I bet a few people will love you for this, I often see this question at the forums, and you answered it well. Good work!"
Mandi Ohlinger: "Great topic and great explanation. It also makes SSO seem less scary :)"
Sandro Pereira: "Very useful sample, well explained with all the necessary code "
boatseller
BizTalk: Using an Orchestration Sync or Async
Sandro Pereira: "Good sample provide by boatseller and well explained."
TGN: "Hey, great work man! This is a well done article and I love it!"
Steef-Jan Wiggers
Exposing data through BizTalk Service Hybrid Connections
Sandro Pereira: "Nice article with a good overview about BizTalk Service Hybrid Connections and how you can configure them."
TGN: "Good article, well explained and good pictures. Again Steef-Jan, you know what you're doing!"
Mandi Ohlinger: "Nice set-up overview. "
Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - May 2014
Sheldon.Jaquay
Forefront Identity Manager - RCDC - Regular Expression
AM: "Great contribution! Option C is clever, and the other examples are also a useful reference. Thanks for sharing your work with the community."
Ed Price: "Nice short article. Great topic, and great blend of code, color, and images!"
Søren Granfeldt: "Nice with a little focus on RegEx with FIM and good help for people wanting to have the portal be just a little more company specific"
GO: "Thanks for the article, but the images weren't clear enough."
Scott Eastin
Installing Oracle MA for FIM R2 on Windows 2012
GO: "EX-CE-LL-EN-T article!"
AM: "Very nice article with clear step-by-step instructions - thanks for putting this together. "
Ed Price: "I love the sections with numbered bullets at the end. They're very clear and easy to read!"
Microsoft Azure Technical Guru - May 2014
João Sousa
Microsoft Azure - Remote Debbuging How To?
GO: "Clever. Well Explained and written. Thanks! You absolutely deserve the GOLD medal."
Ed Price: "Fantastic topic and great use of images!"
Alex Mang
The Move to the New Azure SQL Database Tiers
Ed Price: "Great depth and descriptions! Very timely topic! Lots of collaboration on this article from community members!"
GO: "great article but images are missing"
Alex Mang
Separating Insights Data In Visual Studio Online
Application Insights For Production And Staging Cloud Services
Ed Price: "Good descriptions and clarity!"
GO: "great article but images are missing"
Microsoft Visio Technical Guru - May 2014
Mr X
How to export your Orchestrator Runbooks to Visio and Word
Ed Price: "A basic tip, but very helpful. Good job!"
GO: "Thanks for that!"
SR: "Nice "How To" article explaining the basic steps."
AH: "This article is to the point takes a simple tasks and describes it accurately.
SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - May 2014
Dan Christian
Build a loop workflow using SharePoint 2010
Jinchun Chen: "Excellent article. Personally speaking, the biggest challenge is SharePoint Designer workflow is “while-loop”. Many customers had the same scene as this article set. I am sure they are like this article.
Benoît Jester: "An AWESOME, huge, detailed article by Dan. Did I mention the videos? Thanks Dan!"
GO: "Great article Dan! Thanks!"
Margriet Bruggeman: "Detailed explanation which I admire, but wouldn't be using a vs workflow be more logical in this case?"
Geetanjali Arora
Export User Profile Properties using CSOM
Benoît Jester: "Great article on this new SharePoint 2013 development capability. I appreciate the code explanations."
GO: "This is a great article. Love the way how you explain it."
Margriet Bruggeman: "I will use this piece of code in the future!"
Jinchun Chen: "Nice. How about customized properties? It would be nice more, if a CSOM script version can be attached. "
Inderjeet Singh
Unable
to restore site collection issue
GO: "Simple. Good Written. Clear and Clever. Great article."
Margriet Bruggeman: "Quite handy reference for this particular problem"
Benoît Jester: "Good explanation on the site collection deletion process."
Small Basic Technical Guru - May 2014
Philip Conrod
Programming Home Projects with Microsoft Small Basic: Chapter
1: Writing Programs Using Small Basic
RZ: "Very systematic introduction."
Ed Price: "Good overview article that covers all the basics!"
Michiel Van Hoorn: "Nice introduction into the history of Basic. Needs to be updated to reflect current support for Windows version (Windows NT? LOL )"
Philip Conrod
Programming Home Projects with Microsoft Small Basic: Chapter 6: Flash
Card Math Quiz Project
Michiel Van Hoorn: "This article (or book chapter) is excellent material to learn how to envision, design and build your program. The actual example program is also very usable."
Ed Price: "I love how this tutorial keeps building on itself as it goes!"
Nonki Takahashi
Small Basic: Variable
RZ: "Very nice explanation of the concept of variables!"
Michiel Van Hoorn: "Clear explanation and not frills"
Ed Price: "Great article with fantastic formatting!"
SQL BI and Power BI Technical Guru - May 2014
Durval Ramos
SSIS - Event Handling with "OnError" ou "OnTaskFailed"
Ed Price: "The images are very helpful! Could use a grammar pass. Great descriptions!"
GO: "This article has everything. A conclusion, reference, see also, other languages section. everybody should write actually like this."
NN: "An interesting topic and article but unfortunately a bit hard to understand due to grammar problems"
PT: "This is a good article on a useful topic. Please have your article reviewed and edited for proper language."
S Kamath
Expansion of Time dimension in Analysis Service
PT: "Your article is concise and to the point, and contains useful information. It would be good to conclude with a short summary and perhaps compare this technique to others, discussing best practices."
Ed Price: "Good details on Time Dimension. The images help us understand as we go."
GO: "I like this one, but something is missing. Do not know what, but I had a blast reading the other two's. Does not mean that this one is bad, but there is something missing, maybe my knowledge..."
NN: "Good article, but seems to be missing conclusion. It will also benefit from adding See Also section"
Sherry Li
SSAS – Ignore unrelated dimension or not
NN: "Good and interesting article based on the blog"
GO: "Wonderful article!"
PT: "This is an important topic and contains helpful information but this is a simple topic that can be explained in fewer words. I found this article to be overly detailed and hard to read. I suggest having it reviewed and edited for
proper language."
Ed Price: "Good descriptions. Could be shorter. Good use of images!"
SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - May 2014
Shanky
Curious Case Of Logging In Online and Offline Index Rebuild In Full Recovery
Model
Jinchun Chen: "Good article. Thank you!"
GO: "One of the best Wiki Articles ever! Thanks buddy!"
DRC: "-- This is a great article which provides in-depth information on internals of Online & Offline rebuild index and Transaction logging. -- The following statement need to be re-written for more clarity. “The less logging can be
attributed to the fact that no information about page allocation is logged information about de-allocation is logged please see below figure 13. Also if you compare amount of record returned in this case we had output containing just 64 rows while offline
index rebuild had ____ rows.” -- Overall, a great article, thoroughly enjoyed reading it."
NN: "Very interesting article, another great contribution by Shanky"
Ed Price: "Thorough descriptions and great solution! Good article!"
Uwe Ricken
SQL Server: Be aware of the correct data type for predicates in queries
Ed Price: "Incredibly well formatted! Great breakdown of sections!"
GO: "Whoo, this is a wonderful article!"
DRC: "-- This article explains the Query execution behaviour when the Query is not optimally written which could cause increased execution time. Great article. -- This topic is clearly explained and documented using a simple example and
sample output which is easy is understand. -- Simple, very well written and great article to read. "
NN: "Very good, easy to understand article and important information to know to all SQL Server developers"
System Center Technical Guru - May 2014
Mr X
Central Management of DSRM password on Domain Controllers using Orchestrator
Ed Price: "The images really carry you through this article. Great execution!"
GO: "Great article. I like your article Mr X! Thanks for your passion!"
Kevin Holman: "Nice to see real world examples of Orchestrator in action solving problems that all customers have. This was very simple, but provides an excellent solution."
W P Chomak
System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 - Customizing E-Mail Notifications
AB: "Easy reading info that can help many"
Ed Price: "Short and sweet. An incredibly valuable topic and needed addition to the Wiki!"
GO: "Clever and well written. Thanks"
Christoffer S
System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2 - Install applications in a task sequence based on AD-Groups
Ed Price: "Good mix of code, images, and information. Could use more in-depth descriptions. Great article!"
GO: "Clear and simple! Thank you!"
Transact-SQL Technical Guru - May 2014
Naomi N
T-SQL: Random Equal Distribution
Jinchun Chen: "Nice."
JS: "The crucial thing about such a procedure is to check the data before the randomization and afterwards. You might encounter situations where "John Smith" and "John Meyers" might have exchanged their First names
which is technically correct, but logically and obviously wrong. So make sure that there is one additional check afterwards that makes sure that eventual privicy concerns will not survive the random process. Normally this would not happen, but I have already
checked this is one of my older blog entries, where we exactly had that problem obfuscating data to make that operational and live data will not be recognized afterwards. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jenss/archive/2009/04/08/when-is-random-random-enough.aspx In
addition to this some attributes are sticky to each other like gender and First Name. You also have to make sure that your distribution might change statistically in relation to other attributes."
Richard Mueller: "Very instructive. Perhaps the See Also section should have more links."
Ed Price: "Great formatting and topic! Could benefit from more descriptions. Great article!"
GO: "Naomi, your article is nice. Simple to understand the 'problem' and execute the 'solution""
Manoj Pandey: "Nice article with a different way to resolve a given problem. I think this can also be done by using NTILE() function. I've added the code in comments section."
Rogge H
Extending SYS.Geometry to Utilize Temporal Data
GO: "Great article, I enjoyed reading it. Thank you"
Manoj Pandey: "I like the idea, but it took me some more time to understand the overall logic as I'm new to Geo datatypes, Thanks."
JS: "For me not using this sort of things regularly, I don't see the problem and the benefit. I have no doubt that this is a brilliant explanations how to cope with a problem, but for me this is missing yet the red line. More pictures
would be helpful describing the problem and outlining the results produced."
Richard Mueller: "Needs more explanation, and perhaps an example. There should be links to relevant references."
Ed Price: "Good job on the opening descriptions! Could benefit from breaking up and explaining the code more. Images and references would be helpful. Good article!"
Hasham Niaz
DataCleanUp() Function Implementation in MS SQL Server
Jinchun Chen: "Good."
JS: "-Does actually not work for Case senstive areas where I want to remoce certain Upper/lower case characters. This might be not interesting for some people, but is extremely important and relevant to other people. The limitation is
that I can´t pass multiple values to be removed from the string, right ? Could this be implemented as well as many people wash out their data from unused / unimportant control characters. "I have tested it on a table which has got more than 11 Million
rows and it executed fine returning the correct results. Since this is a scalar function you will notice decrease in performance." Once you want to maintain the old data and keep the new cleaned up one seperately, you could suggest something like persisting
the data in a computed column which could be indexed and then help improving the performance. This would not be the case for any adhoc queries though."
Richard Mueller: "Very clever and also very useful. There should be links to references, for example to explain the PATINDEX function."
Ed Price: "Great job on this article! Very clear and well executed! See JS's comments for some thoughts about what's possible. Great article!"
Manoj Pandey: "A good utility Function that I can use and tweak for my future needs, Thanks."
Jaliya Udagedara
Calling WCF Service from a Stored Procedure in Microsoft SQL Server 2012
GO: "Gold Winner. For sure!"
Ed Price: "Amazing article! The depth, images, and code formatting make this fantastic!"
NN: "Great article, thorough explanations, great interaction in the comments - very useful tutorial"
Søren Granfeldt: "Nice work."
João Sousa
ASP.NET MVC 5 - Bootstrap 3.0 in 3 Steps
GO: "Thanks for that great article"
Ed Price: "Great formatting! Good use of images!"
NN: "Nice introduction to Bootstrap in ASP.MVC project"
Søren Granfeldt: "Just a little more technical explanation would be nice"
Critical_stop
Using 64-bit shortcuts from a 32-bit application
NN: "Good and short article, right to the point"
Søren Granfeldt: "Mixing and matching 32/64 bit always seems to give people a hassle. This will help those having issues."
GO: "good one!"
Ed Price: "Good article. Short and sweet."
Wiki and Portals Technical Guru - May 2014
XAML guy
TechNet Guru Competition: Judge System Explanation
GO: "No one could do it beter than you Pete! Thanks!"
Richard Mueller: "Excellent explanation of the judging system. Perhaps could use a See Also section."
Ed Price: "Good quote from Shanky in the comments, "Awesome....Kudos to your for your beautiful work" -- Great job!"
NN: "Very good article. It may also benefit from See Also section"
Payman Biukaghazadeh
TechNet Wiki Persian Council
GO: "Go Persion GOOO!"
Richard Mueller: "The Persian Council is an excellent idea. The link to "How to Write an Article" should be in a See Also section, along with other articles."
NN: "Great article, missing a link to other portals and councils pages"
Ed Price: "Thank you to Payman and the Persian community for jumping in! The Wiki is warm!"
Durval Ramos
Wiki: Best Practices for building TechNet Wiki Portals
Ed Price: "Fantastic job from Durval on helping us standardize the portals!"
NN: "Good article, but unfortunately a bit hard to read and understand due to bad grammar. "
Richard Mueller: "Excellent and important topic. Grammar still needs work. I like the links and See Also."
Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps Technical Guru - May 2014
Sara Silva
Authentication using Facebook, Google and Microsoft account in WP8.0 App (MVVM)
Ed Price: "Great article! Great code formatting and good use of code comments for descriptions of what your code's doing! Could be improved by breaking out the code with more descriptions in the article (in addition to
the code comments). Very in-depth article! "
Peter Laker: "An excellent article, pulling together all the bits you need to make this happen"
SubramanyamRaju.B
WindowsPhone Facebook Integration:How to post message/image to FaceBook Fan
Page(C#-XAML)
Ed Price: "Good topic! Code blocks would help with the formatting. Good job on this article!"
Peter Laker: "Love this, very useful to many I'm sure, thanks!"
Saad Mahmood
Creating a custom control in Expression Blend with Custom Properties (WindowsPhone
& Store)
Ed Price: "This has a good mix of descriptions and clarity! The images help a lot!"
Peter Laker: "A nice introduction to our beloved Blend. Great work!"
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Technical Guru - May 2014
Magnus (MM8)
WPF/MVVM: Merging Cells In a ListView
KJ: "Ah the collectionViewSource -- never used it myself but this looks like a good reference article if I ever needed to..."
GO: "Thank you!"
Ed Price: "Great formatting and good descriptions. Short and sweet! Another fantastic entry from Magnus!"
Peter Laker: "Thank you again Magnus"
Windows Server Technical Guru - May 2014
Mr X
How to implement User
Activity Recording for AD-Integrated Critical Servers by combining the use of Group Policy, Powershell and Orchestrator
Philippe Levesque: "Really good information and detailed step."
JH: "brilliant, love how it combines different technologies to achieve a solution, clearly written and well illustrated."
JM: "Another excellent article, thanks again for your many great contributions"
Richard Mueller: "Very creative solution. Great to have such detailed steps and images."
GO: "I like the conclusion. Thanks"
Mr X
How Domain Controllers are located in Windows
GO: "Super article Mr X! Merci!"
JM: "Yet again, excellent article."
Richard Mueller: "Good documentation. An explanation of how the priorities and weights are determined would help. A See Also section would also help."
Philippe Levesque: "Good "In deep" information. Good to know to help diagnose computer problem in AD's site."
JH: "another good article, great diagrams. Some repetition but it does help clarify a complex issue. "
Mahdi Tehrani
Detailed Concepts:Secure Channel Explained
JH: "great article. This fills an important gap in this content space. Editing is a little rough, but diagrams and explanations are clear."
JM: "This is a very good article, however you need to provide more detail in the section on how to fix a broken Channel."
Richard Mueller: "Excellent topic. Grammar needs work. Good images. Could use a See Also section."
Philippe Levesque: "Really good explanation of the secure's channel, I like the debugging step included ! "
GO: "Thanks for this, not everybody know about secure channel."
As mentioned above, runners up and their judge feedback were removed from this forum post, to fit into the forum's 60,000 character limit.
A great big thank you to EVERYONE who contributed an article to last month's competition.
Hopefully we will see you ALL again in this month's listings?
As mentioned above, runners up and comments were removed from this post, to fit into the forum's 60,000 character limit.
You will find the complete post, comments and feedback on the
main post.
Please join the discussion, add a comment, or suggest future categories.
If you have not yet contributed an article for this month, and you think you can write a more useful, clever, or better produced wiki article than the winners above,
here's your chance! :D
More about the TechNet Guru Awards:
TechNet Guru Competitions
#PEJL
Got any nice code? If you invest time in coding an elegant, novel or impressive answer on MSDN forums, why not copy it over to the one and only
TechNet Wiki, for future generations to benefit from! You'll never get archived again!
If you are a member of any user groups, please make sure you list them in the
Microsoft User Groups Portal. Microsoft are trying to help promote your groups, and collating them here is the first step.Congrats to Shanky and Uwe!
SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - May 2014
Shanky
Curious Case Of Logging In Online and Offline Index Rebuild In Full Recovery
Model
Jinchun Chen: "Good article. Thank you!"
GO: "One of the best Wiki Articles ever! Thanks buddy!"
DRC: "-- This is a great article which provides in-depth information on internals of Online & Offline rebuild index and Transaction logging. -- The following statement need to be re-written for more clarity. “The less logging can be attributed
to the fact that no information about page allocation is logged information about de-allocation is logged please see below figure 13. Also if you compare amount of record returned in this case we had output containing just 64 rows while offline index rebuild
had ____ rows.” -- Overall, a great article, thoroughly enjoyed reading it."
NN: "Very interesting article, another great contribution by Shanky"
Ed Price: "Thorough descriptions and great solution! Good article!"
Uwe Ricken
SQL Server: Be aware of the correct data type for predicates in queries
Ed Price: "Incredibly well formatted! Great breakdown of sections!"
GO: "Whoo, this is a wonderful article!"
DRC: "-- This article explains the Query execution behaviour when the Query is not optimally written which could cause increased execution time. Great article. -- This topic is clearly explained and documented using a simple example and sample
output which is easy is understand. -- Simple, very well written and great article to read. "
NN: "Very good, easy to understand article and important information to know to all SQL Server developers"
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
SQL Server installation error Could Not Find Database Engine Startup Handle by
Shanky
Ed Price: "Wow, what an amazing article! Fantastic code formatting, great descriptions, and the images help you when you need it!"
NN: "I read this article with great interest. The funny thing is that at the same time I was reading someone was having this exact problem in UniversalThread.com forum, so I was able to refer him to this article. UPDATE. Looks like he is still
having problems"
GO: "Thank you so much!"
DRC: " -- This article -- Explains on modifying/deleting the registry keys after backup -- But it doesn't provide the level/how to back up the registry. -- We also need to warn the users that if we modify/delete the wrong registry key it might
lead to crash of SQL or even WINDOWS -- In case there are multiple instances on the same machine following this article would cause all the SQL instance to crash. -- So it would be better to contact the support team or before trying out the action steps. "
5 Top Features Your Company Can Use in SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition by Richard
Douglas
NN: "Very well written and quite interesting. Since it's originated from the blog, it has a personal touch which is more appropriate for a blog "
DRC: " -- Expand the word GA (General Availability) in the below sentence and correct the spelling mistake "it was written before the GA of SQL Server 2014" "SSD technology and a chunk of this session was on BPE" "who doesn't’t like playing
with new cool stuff!" "which doesn't’t sound as impressive" "business from the likes of Oracle et al." -- This is a good article and provides all the required information and links to Microsoft website for more details. "
Ed Price: "Fantastic topic, but it should be made more "Wiki like" and less personalized. Anybody in the community can help us do that! "
Ed Price, Power BI & SQL Server Customer Program Manager (Blog,
Small Basic,
Wiki Ninjas,
Wiki)
Answer an interesting question?
Create a wiki article about it! -
How to get a certificate for SQL server (Virtual machine) on Azura
Hi
I am lost and I don't know what to do have a certificate available for SQL2014 (Data warehousing virtual machine Size A7).
My purpose is to connect to SQL server via Power Query and Engagement Studio with Encryption connection option ticked.
I have looked at a lot of pages via Google and I wish there is a clear step-by-step guide for me to follow. This is a MS Cloud with a predefined virtual machine. There should be some guide. Can you point me to the right direction please?
I have aHi,
Here are some related links below for you:
a real certificate for a virtual machine
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/7c48763f-fb04-46c6-a6e6-c21740d007cf/a-real-certificate-for-a-virtual-machine?forum=WAVirtualMachinesforWindows
Configuring a custom domain name for an Azure cloud service
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-custom-domain-name/
Create a Service Certificate for Azure
https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/gg432987.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
Since we are not familiar with Azure, if the information above is not helpful, please post another thread in Azure forums and post a feedback regarding your requirement:
http://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback
Best Regards,
Amy
Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and un-mark them if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact
[email protected] -
Which is better for performance Azure SQL Database or SQL Server in Azure VM?
Hi,
We are building an ASP.NET app that will be running on Microsoft Cloud which I think is the new name for Windows Azure. We're expecting this app to have many simultaneous users and want to make sure that we provide excellent performance to end users.
Here are our main concerns/desires:
Performance is paramount. Fast response times are very very important
We want to have as little to do with platform maintenance as possible e.g. managing OS or SQL Server updates, etc.
We are trying to use "out-of-the-box" standard features.
With that said, which option would give us the best possible database performance: a SQL Server instance running in a VM on Azure or SQL Server Database as a fully managed service?
Thanks, Samhello,
SQL Database using shared resources on the Microsft data centre. Microsoft balance the resource usage of SQL Database so that no one application continuously dominates any resource.You can try the
Premium Preview
for Windows Azure SQL Database which offers better performance by guaranteeing a fixed amount of dedicated resources for a database.
If you using SQL Server instance running in a VM, you control the operating system and database configuration. And the
performance of the database depends on many factors such as the size of a virtual machine, and the configuration of the data disks.
Reference:
Choosing between SQL Server in Windows Azure VM & Windows Azure SQL Database
Regards,
Fanny Liu
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Fanny Liu
TechNet Community Support -
SQL Server 2012 Infrastructure Best Practice
Hi,
I would welcome some pointers (direct advice or pointers to good web sites) on setting up a hosted infrastructure for SQL Server 2012. I am limited to using VMs on a hosted site. I currently have a single 2012 instance with DB, SSIS, SSAS on the same server.
I currently RDP onto another server which holds the BI Tools (VS2012, SSMS, TFS etc), and from here I can create projects and connect to SQL Server.
Up to now, I have been heavily restricted by the (shared tenancy) host environment due to security issues, and have had to use various local accounts on each server. I need to put forward a preferred environment that we can strive towards, which is relatively
scalable and allows me to separate Dev/Test/Live operations and utilise Windows Authentication throughout.
Any help in creating a straw man would be appreciated.
Some of the things I have been thinking through are:
1. Separate server for Live Database, and another server for Dev/Test databases
2. Separate server for SSIS (for all 3 environments)
3. Separate server for SSAS (not currently using cubes, but this is a future requirement. Perhaps do not need dedicated server?)
4. Separate server for Development (holding VS2012, TFS2012,SSMS etc). Is it worth having local SQL Server DB on this machine. I was unsure where SQL Server Agent Jobs are best run from i.e. from Live Db only, from another SQL Server Instance, or to
utilise SQL ServerAgent on all (Live, Test and Dev) SQL Server DB instances. Running from one place would allow me to have everything executable from one place, with centralised package reporting etc. I would also benefit from some license cost
reductions (Kingsway tools)
5. Separate server to hold SSRS, Tableau Server and SharePoint?
6. Separate Terminal Server or integrated onto Development Server?
7. I need server to hold file (import and extract) folders for use by SSIS packages which will be accessible by different users
I know (and apologise that) I have given little info about the requirement. I have an opportunity to put forward my requirement for x months into the future, and there is a mass of info out there which is not distilled in a way I can utilise. It would
be helpful to know what I should aim for, in terms of separate servers for the different services and/or environments (Live/Test/Live), and specifically best practice for where SQL Server Agent jobs should be run from , and perhaps a little info on how to
best control deployment/change control . (Note my main interest is not in application development, it is in setting up packages to load/refresh data marts fro reporting purposes).
Many thanks,
KenHello,
On all cases, consider that having a separate server may increase licensing or hosting costs.
Please allow to recommend you Windows Azure for cloud services.
Answers.
This is always a best practice.
Having SSIS on a separate server allows you isolate import/export packages, but may increase network traffic between servers. I don’t know if your provider charges
money for incoming traffic or outgoing traffic.
SSAS on a separate server certainly a best practice too.
It contributes to better performance and scalability.
SQL Server Developer Edition cost about $50 dollars only. Are you talking about centralizing job scheduling on an on-premises computer than having jobs enable on a
cloud service? Consider PowerShell to automate tasks.
If you will use Reporting Services on SharePoint integrated mode you should install Reporting Services on the same server where SharePoint is located.
SQL Server can coexist with Terminal Services with the exception of clustered environments.
SSIS packages may be competing with users for accessing to files. Maybe copying them to a disk resource available for the SSIS server may be a better solution.
A few more things to consider:
Performance storage subsystem on the cloud service.
How Many cores? How much RAM?
Creating a Domain Controller or using active directory services.
These resources may be useful.
http://www.iis.net/learn/web-hosting/configuring-servers-in-the-windows-web-platform/sql-2008-for-hosters
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2013/02/14/choosing-between-sql-server-in-windows-azure-vm-windows-azure-sql-database/
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Alberto Morillo
SQLCoffee.com -
How do I set up Azure Sql Server to have multiple instances?
Hi all;
We are setting up a new SAAS application on Azure and while we have used Azure before, not at this level of multiple apps, etc.
We plan to have both a web app and a cloud app in both a US and EU data center. They need to hit a common database because requests will go to the closest data center via traffic manager and a lot of the data works off of the customer table. And a customer
(company) can have users in both the U.S. and E.U.
Is there a way to set up Azure Sql Server so it has instances in both data centers, and Azure keeps them synchronized? If I understand sharding right, that is not what we need as someone hitting either data center could be requesting any of the data in the
DB.
thanks - dave
What we did for the last 6 months -
Made the world's coolest reporting & docgen system even more amazingHi,
As far as I am aware, when you set the webapp/cloudapp to connect to a database you will have to specify the connection string in the app. The app will hit the database which is mentioned in the connection string you have specified. So it is not automatic
or Traffic manager. You have full control over it as you can tell your app to connect whichever database you want.The database could be located in any region, however the you have to keep latency in mind as the app in US Datacenter could be calling the Database
in EU, if that is they way it is setup.
You can have separate databases in each region and use Azure Data Sync
to have the database synchronized, however please keep in mind that Azure Data Sync is in Preview.
Regards,
Mekh. -
Load flat files from S3 into SQL Server 2008 R2
Hi, We have a few customers dropping files in Amazon S3. Could you please let me know how to load this data into SQL Server 2008 R2 database using SSIS? We are 2008 R2 BIDS environment.
Thanks in advance..............
IoneHi ione721,
You can install the PostgreSQL ODBC driver so that you can use the .Net Providers\Odbc Data Provider for ADO.NET Source component to connect to the Amazon cloud storage. After that, you can use a OLE DB Destination to load the data to SQL Server database.
Reference:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/mgmt/configure-odbc-connection.html
Regards,
Mike Yin
TechNet Community Support -
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Pricing (2014)
I'd like to know what would cost to use SSRS on Azure. As Windows Azure SQL Reporting will be discontinued on 10/31/2014, I tried to find licensing options for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) running on Windows Azure Virtual Machines (VM). I guess
I need to purchase a VM on Azure. But what other licenses are needed? Do I need a separate SQL Server licence if I already have Windows Azure SQL Database? Is there also a price for using SSRS on a VM?
Can please provide the alternatives with pricing or a link with this information.
Thank you.hi Martin,
Base on my understanding, if we use predefined image (included sql server), we don't need use license , see this toturail (http://blog.aditi.com/cloud/hosting-sql-reporting-service-on-azure-virtual-machine/
). Or if we want install sql server on azure VM, we need purchase the license of sql server. If you only use SSRS on VM, I think you could only purchase slq server license. I recommend you refer to this page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg430130.aspx#bkmk_new
) and this Compare licensing fees using the pricing calculator .
If I misunderstood, please let me know.
Regards,
Will
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EM12c: Add Target SQL Server 2012 Fails
EM12c: Add Target SQL Server 2012 Fails
Configuration:
EM12c platform:
Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.2(x86_64)
Oracle Enterprise Database 11.2.0.3 (x86_64)
Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.1) (x86_64)
Microsoft SQL Server Plug-In 12.1.0.2.0 deployed in the Management Server
Target:
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition SP1 (64-bit)
SQL Server 2012 (Enterprise Edition) (64-bit)
Microsoft SQL Server Plug-In 12.1.0.2.0 deployed in the Management Agent
Problem: EM12c fails to add a SQL Server 2012 instance.
Target Name: mssql_mcsdbsqlsrv2.esri.com
Target Type: Microsoft SQL Server
Agent: https://mcsdbsqlsrv2.esri.com:3872/emd/main/
* JDBC URL (Example : jdbc:sqlserver://<host>:<port>): jdbc:sqlserver://mcsdbsqlsrv2.esri.com:1433
JDBC Driver (Optional): com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
Database Username (Required for SQL Authentication): sa
Password of Database User (Required for SQL Authentication): ****
System Username (Needed when SQLServer is at remote location):
System Password (Needed when SQLServer is at remote location):
Connect Using Windows Integrated Authentication (Yes/No): No
Role (Optional):
Error:
MSSQLDetermineName_DynamicProperty;em_error=Could not connect. Error code = 0x8004100e
em_error=Failed while connecting to WMI.
Response;Can't resolve a non-optional query descriptor property [provided_sql_server_name] (ms_sqlserver_servername)
The sa login is enabled and I can connect from a remote machine to the MSSQL 2012 server using SQL Server Management Studio.
I have also added several default MSSQL 2008 instances to EM12c successfull.
I've installed the latest "Microsoft SQL Server Plug-In 12.1.0.2.0" in EM12c and deployed it to the target agent in the MSSQL 2012 machine
Does EM12c (12.1.0.1) support MSSQL 2012?
Thanks,
Marcelo Marques
Technical Manager, Esri
Edited by: Marcelo Marques - ESRI on Sep 26, 2012 9:12 AM
Edited by: Marcelo Marques - ESRI on Sep 26, 2012 9:13 AMHello All,
What is the latest information on MSSQL 2012 support on EM12c as a supported Target Deployment?
Thanks
Jan S. -
Which path will be the perfect in MCSD for me to deal with SQL Server Stuff ?
I intended to be a SQL Server developer and Administrator , but I planning to take MCSD before MCSA SQL Server 2012 , to help me to developing a full solutions to any database system , but I found MCSD certificate had more than one path
First Path
MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C# :
Exam 70-483
- Manage program flow (25%)
- Create and use types (24%)
- Debug applications and implement security (25%)
- Implement data access (26%)
Exam 70-484
- Design Windows Store apps (20-25%)
- Develop Windows Store apps (15-20%)
- Create the user interface (20-25%)
- Program the user interaction (20-25%)
Manage security and data (20-25%)
Exam 70-485
- Develop Windows Store apps (15–20%)
- Discover and interact with devices (15–20%)
- Program user interaction (15–20%)
- Enhance the user interface (15–20%)
- Manage data and security (15–20%)
- Prepare for a solution deployment (15–20%)
Second Path
MCSD: Web Applications
Exam 70-480
- Implement and manipulate document structures and objects (24%)
- Implement program flow (25%)
- Access and secure data (26%)
- Use CSS3 in applications (25%)
Exam 70-486
- Design the application architecture
- Design the user experience
- Develop the user experience
- Troubleshoot and debug web applications
- Design and implement security
Exam 70-487
- Accessing data (24%)
- Querying and manipulating data by using the Entity Framework (20%)
- Designing and implementing WCF Services (19%)
- Creating and consuming Web API-based services (18%)
- Deploying web applications and services (19%)
The question now which path I must take before I delve into MCSA SQL Server 2012 will help me more in the database world and sharp my skills as a database developer and administrator in the future and will help me to create or develope a full solutions
to any database system in the future , and also this path will be related more to database world and more valuable in the job market
In other words, Which path contain alot of work with databases and SQL stuff , will help me in SQL Server , Please Help
Mohamed Ahmed Database Administrator & DeveloperHi, MohamedDBA.
I agree with Horizon_Net that the MCSD: Web Applications certification would be best for your certification goals. Especially since you are concerned with becoming certified in the future of database development technologies.
Specifically, the 70-487 certification exam covers programming with WCF (for data access over the internet/intranet), Entity Framework (for data access anywhere), Web API (REST Services for data access over the internet/intranet), and Microsoft Azure
(for hosting databases, applications, and much more in the cloud). Most likely, you will be managing SQL Server databases in the cloud in your future.
I highly recommend that you swap 70-483 for 70-480, which will still count for the
MCSD: Web Applications certification. The 70-483 C# programming exam will be really useful while studying the C# language, which is used by the 70-486 and 70-487 exams. As well, just by passing this one exam, you will earn the title
Specialist: Programming in C# title. Here are the details (including the ability to swap the two exams, under
Additional Options) for this MCSD title:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/mcsd-web-apps-certification.aspx
I must warn you that the MCSA: SQL Server certification will require you to pass the 70-643 exam. It includes content on Microsoft Business Intelligence tools. Specifically, the 70-463 exam requires you to know SQL Server Integration Services
(SSIS) and SQL Server Analysis Service (SSAS). Here are the details:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/exam-70-463.aspx
Please know that the MCSA: SQL Server exams are based on SQL Server 2012 and will remain about SQL Server 2012. Only the four (MCSE) exams (two for each MCSE SQL Server title) are going to be updated to SQL Server 2014 in April 24th, 2014. Here are the details
from Larry Kaye (Microsoft employee):
http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/weblog/archive/2014/03/10/certification-update-sql-server-2014.aspx
Good luck!
Best wishes, Davin Mickelson -
SQL Server 2012 software and licencing
Hi folks,
We've purchased some per core licences for a SQL 2012 install.
When I try to install SQL 2012 I get asked to put in a licence key or choose evaluation, but all we have is paperwork proving the purchase of the licences, we were told we wouldn't be provided with a key.
The only way I know of to install the software without needing a key is if I download a copy from MSDN.
Am I OK to use an MSDN copy in production if we have the paper licences or should we be using a different software source?
If we can't are there copies of the SQL software available that doesn't need a key and is specifically for the above situation?
Thanks for any help on this,
Regards,
CJHello,
This is a community forum for technical questions & issues.
For question regarding pricing / licensing please contact a Microsoft sales partner or licensing expert.
Call (1-800-426-9400), Monday through Friday, 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM PST to speak directly to Microsoft licensing specialist.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/sql-server/buy.aspx
But in common you should get the license key from the shop where you have purchased the license.
Olaf Helper
[ Blog] [ Xing] [ MVP]
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