In the next few months I will be speaking at some awesome events around Europe. SQLBits - April 5-8 SQLBits is THE SQL Server event in Europe, with a very long tradition and a fantastic audience. I totally love SQLBits! This time I will speak about “Benchmarking like a PRO”. In this session I will demonstrate how to capture a baseline with RML Utilities and how to replay it against a target machine to compare baseline and benchmarks. [Read More]

A couple of years ago I blogged about Installing the SQL Server 2014 Language Reference Help from disk. With SQL Server 2016 things changed significantly: we have the new Help Viewer 2.2, which is shipped with the Management Studio setup kit. However, despite all the changes in the way help works and is shipped, I am still unable to download and install help content from the web, so I resorted to using the same trick that I used for SQL Server 2014. [Read More]

Today I published the first release of ForumSurfer, a RSS reader designed explicitly to be a tool for the SQL Server online community. Here is a screenshot: ForumSurfer has some unique features that will help you help others online: it is designed to help you keep an eye on multiple communities through their RSS feeds it opens questions in the integrated web browser it can update from the feeds much more often than online RSS readers do it has built-in support for boilerplate answers it supports high-DPI displays, letting you choose the appropriate zoom level for individual sites it can import/export OPML files (you can start by importing the OPML file containing all the online SQL Server communities I'm keeping on the radar) What are you waiting for? [Read More]

One of the most popular posts on this bog describes how to enable bitmap scaling is SSMS on high DPI displays, which is a sign that more and more people are starting to use 4K displays and are unhappy with SSMS’s behaviour at high DPI. The solution described in that post is to enable bitmap scaling, which renders graphic objects correctly, at the price of some blurriness. The good news is that starting with SSMS 16. [Read More]

Brent Ozar recently published the feedback he got on his abstract submissions for PASS Summit 2016 and, as he often does, started a trend which some others followed. I think the feedback is interesting and useful for speakers that plan to improve their own submissions for the years to come, so I decided I will publish my feedback as well. I did not get selected and, obviously, I would be happier if I got selected instead. [Read More]

The next few months will be crazy for me. I will be travelling a lot around Europe, speaking about SQL Server topics. Here is where you will find me in the upcoming weeks: May 4: SQLNexus SQLNexus is a new conference in Copenhagen and will be the official launch event in Denmark for SQL Server 2016. I will speak about "Responding to Extended Events in near Real-Time". May 5: SQLBits SQLBits doesn't need to be introduced. [Read More]

This will be no surprise to those who have been working with SQL Server for a long time, but it can be puzzling at first and actually I was a bit confused myself when I stumbled upon this behavior for the first time. SQL Server treats windows users in a special way, a way that could lead us to some interesting observations. First of all, we need a test database and a couple of windows principals to perform our tests: [Read More]

Today, thanks to a customer, I discovered one of those annoying little things that can really drive you nuts. Basically, they were trying to restore a backup using the SSMS Restore Database window and they kept getting “No backupset selected to be restored” whenever a backup file was selected. You just had to select a file for restore and click OK… … to be met with an error message in the Restore Database window: [Read More]

I spent the last few weeks travelling a lot compared to my usual routine and I got quickly fed up with bringing my mobile workstation with me. My Dell precision M4600 is a powerhouse, but it’s definitely too big and too heavy for travelling, so I decided it was time to buy a small laptop just for travelling and presenting at SQL Saturdays and events around Europe. After lots of research, I pulled the trigger on a new XPS13. [Read More]

Don’t tell me that you didn’t see it coming: at some point, Developers end up being put to hell by a DBA! I don’t want to enter the DBA/Developer wars, but some sins committed by Developers really deserve a ticket to the SQL Server hell. In particular, some of those sins are perpetrated when not even a single line of code is written yet and they have to do with the way the development environment is set up. [Read More]