trace flags

Some months ago I posted a method to overcome some quirks in the MDW database in a clustered environment. Today I tried to upgrade that clustered instance (in a test environment, fortunately) and I got some really annoying errors. Actually, I got what I deserved for messing with the system databases and I wouldn’t even dare posting my experience if it wasn’t cause by something I suggested on this blog. [Read More]

Yesterday the CSS team made the QUERYTRACEON hint publicly documented. This means that now it’s officially supported and you can use it in production code. After reading the post on the CSS blog, I started to wonder whether there is some actual use in production for this query hint, given that it requires the same privileges as DBCC TRACEON, which means you have to be a member of the sysadmin role. [Read More]

In order to avoid collation conflict issues with TempDB, all user databases on a SQL Server instance should be set to the same collation. Temporary tables and table variables are stored in TempDB, that means that, unless explicitly defined, all character-based columns are created using the database collation, which is the same of the master database. If user databases have a different collation, joining physical tables to temporary tables may cause a collation conflict. [Read More]