MSSQL Tiger Team
This is the official web log for the SQL Server engineering team – we focus on learning customer workloads running on SQL Server, integrating that feedback to enhance the product, and provide guidance on using SQL Server to solve customers' business challenges.
We have moved!
Thanks for visiting! This blog has now been migrated to:...
Date: 03/29/2019
We are moving!
This blog is in the process of being migrated to one of the new consolidated SQL Server and Azure...
Date: 03/04/2019
Let’s talk about trace flags
One of the most confusing aspects of SQL Server configuration is often trace flags. There are lots...
Date: 01/14/2019
Replica Failover within the Secondary Availability Group in a Distributed Availability Group
A distributed availability group (distributed AG) is a special type of availability group that spans...
Date: 01/09/2019
SQL Server 2017 on Linux: Support for third-party AD providers
In the past, SQL Server on Linux has required SSSD to be configured for AD Authentication to work....
Date: 11/26/2018
Failover Detection Utility - Availability Group Failover Analysis Made Easy
To analyze the root cause for the failover of an Availability group, users are required to perform...
Date: 11/19/2018
String or Binary data would be truncated: replacing the infamous error 8152
In the recent announcement at Ignite 2018 on the release of SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.0, the new Big...
Date: 10/24/2018
SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.0 New Features – Columnstore support for sp_estimate_data_compression_savings
Next up for new Storage Engine area features in SQL Server 2019 is an update to the...
Date: 10/22/2018
SQL Server 2019 Preview
Earlier this week, we announced SQL Server 2019 Public Preview at Microsoft Ignite. All the features...
Date: 09/26/2018
Developer’s Choice: Hinting Query Execution model
Over the years you have read a number of blogs advocating for or against trace flags that influence...
Date: 09/19/2018
SQL Server on Linux: ADAuth issues 3: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user ‘CONTOSO\user’
AD authentication is a popular mechanism for login and user authentication. It works very well in...
Date: 09/06/2018
SQL Server on Linux: ADAuth issues 2: Common AD Login Issues
AD authentication is a popular mechanism for login and user authentication. It works very well in...
Date: 09/05/2018
SQL Server on Linux: ADAuth issues 1: Issues with joining a VM to a domain
AD authentication is a popular mechanism for login and user authentication. It works very well in...
Date: 09/04/2018
Installing SQL Server 2017 for Linux on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
[UPDATE as of 2018/11/21 at the end.] Prior to SQL Server for Linux 2017 CU10 the package...
Date: 08/29/2018
SQL Server Availability Groups – Enhanced Database Level Failover
Database level health detection failover (DB_Failover) option for Availability Groups was introduced...
Date: 07/25/2018
Behavior Change for VSS Backups on VMs with Basic Availability Groups
This week we released SQL Server 2016 SP2 CU2 and SQL Server 2017 CU9. In this blog, I’d like to go...
Date: 07/20/2018
Predicate Pushdown and why should I care?
If you follow this blog, you know that in the last couple years, we have been adding more...
Date: 07/06/2018
TEMPDB – Files and Trace Flags and Updates, Oh My!
TL;DR – Update to the latest CU, create multiple tempdb files, if you're on SQL 2014 or earlier...
Date: 06/29/2018
Optimizing Replication Agent profile parameters for better performance
When SQL Server replication is used on environments with high traffic OLTP systems, users often need...
Date: 06/26/2018
Clustered Columnstore Index: Massively Parallel Trickle Insert
A traditional scenario of loading data into CCI is a nightly load from one or more data files...
Date: 06/04/2018
SQL Server 2016/2017: Availability group secondary replica redo model and performance
When availability group was initially released with SQL Server 2012, the transaction log redo was...
Date: 06/01/2018
Replication Enhancement – Improved Distribution Database Cleanup
Replication Distribution database is the perhaps the most important entity in the entire replication...
Date: 04/30/2018
Replication Enhancement – Distribution Database in Availability Group
SQL Server replication uses the publisher, distributor, and subscriber paradigm to provide logical...
Date: 04/19/2018
SQL Server Replication Enhancement – Dynamic Reloading of Agent Profile Parameters
With SQL Server 2017 Cumulative Update 3, we introduced an improvement to SQL Server Replication...
Date: 02/24/2018
More Showplan enhancements – UDFs
As I mentioned on yesterday’s post, with the recent release of SQL Server 2017 CU3, we released yet...
Date: 02/20/2018
More Showplan enhancements – Row Goal
As I shared before, we have been working for over a year to make showplan the one-stop-shop for...
Date: 02/19/2018
Analyze Synchronous Commit Impact on High Commit Rate Workloads
Recently the SQL Server Always On Support team at Microsoft CSS published a blog on analyzing the...
Date: 02/08/2018
Centennial apps/desktop bridge, SQL Server and error "The data area passed to a system call is too small."
Update as on 3/28 at the bottom of the page. The title of the blog may throw someone off a little....
Date: 12/11/2017
New in SSMS - Always On Availability Group Latency Reports
With SQL Server 2012 we introduced Always On Availability Groups, and the Always On Availability...
Date: 12/07/2017
Upgrade your SQL Server to scale before adding new hardware
In SQL Server Tiger team, we closely partner with our customers and partners to ensure they can...
Date: 11/29/2017
How we made backups faster with SQL Server 2017
In my previous blog post on enhancements in SQL Server 2017, we briefly introduced improved backup...
Date: 11/22/2017
Perfect statistics histogram in just few steps
A similar question about statistics came to the team twice this week: why does updating with...
Date: 11/21/2017
Making parallelism waits actionable
During PASS we announced changes to how users will be able to make parallelism waits more actionable...
Date: 11/10/2017
New Showplan enhancements
If you follow this blog, you have seen that in the past few releases we have continuously included a...
Date: 11/08/2017
Monitoring SQL Server and Azure SQL DB Session at DBA Fundamentals PASS VC
On 10/17/2017, we delivered a webinar session titled "Comprehensive Guide for Monitoring SQL Server...
Date: 10/18/2017
SQL Server Tiger at PASS Summit 2017
The SQL Server team will again be at the Summit this year. If we are not speaking or co-speaking in...
Date: 10/12/2017
SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 4 (SP4) is now available!
SQL Server Product Team is excited to bring you the final release of SQL Server 2012 Service Packs,...
Date: 10/05/2017
Backup Compression for TDE-enabled Databases: Important fixes in SQL 2016 SP1 CU4 and SQL 2016 RTM CU7
Backup Compression and Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) have been two immensely valuable and...
Date: 09/20/2017
Choosing the right server memory for restore and recovery of memory-optimized databases
Recovering database with memory-optimized tables involves hydrating the contents of checkpoint files...
Date: 08/28/2017
Persisting statistics sampling rate
When SQL Server creates or updates statistics and a sampling rate is not manually specified, SQL...
Date: 08/11/2017
New in SSMS: Searching in Showplan
Have you ever analyzed a somewhat big plan? And while doing so did you ever wish you could search...
Date: 08/08/2017
New in SSMS: Performance Dashboard built-in
Back in 2007, we released the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports, which were...
Date: 08/07/2017
Correlating xEvents with DMVs
Since the inception of xEvents there has been the need to occasionally correlate data from xEvent...
Date: 08/02/2017
SQL Server 2016, Minimal logging and Impact of the Batchsize in bulk load operations
One of the design goals of SQL Server 2016 was to improve performance and scalability of the engine...
Date: 08/01/2017
Loan Chargeoff Prediction Solution Templates are Live in Cortana Intelligence Solutions Gallery
A charged off loan is a loan that is declared by a creditor (usually a lending institution) that an...
Date: 06/30/2017
Indirect Checkpoint and tempdb – the good, the bad and the non-yielding scheduler
Indirect checkpoint was first introduced in SQL Server 2012 to provide predictable database recovery...
Date: 06/27/2017
SQL Server Diagnostics (Preview)
EDIT (1/10/2018): As of yesterday, this preview service was shutdown. SQL Server customers...
Date: 06/23/2017