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:...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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....

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud Date: 10/22/2018

SQL Server 2019 Preview

Earlier this week, we announced SQL Server 2019 Public Preview at Microsoft Ignite. All the features...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: Pam Lahoud 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...

Author: SourabhAgarwal 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...

Author: Sunil Agarwal 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...

Author: Dong Cao Date: 06/01/2018

Replication Enhancement – Improved Distribution Database Cleanup

Replication Distribution database is the perhaps the most important entity in the entire replication...

Author: SourabhAgarwal Date: 04/30/2018

Replication Enhancement – Distribution Database in Availability Group

SQL Server replication uses the publisher, distributor, and subscriber paradigm to provide logical...

Author: SourabhAgarwal 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...

Author: SourabhAgarwal 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...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: SourabhAgarwal 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....

Author: SQL Server Engineering Team 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...

Author: SourabhAgarwal 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...

Author: Parikshit Savjani 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...

Author: Parikshit Savjani 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...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: Ebru1 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...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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,...

Author: SQL Server Engineering Team 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...

Author: Parikshit Savjani 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...

Author: Prashanth Purnananda Date: 08/28/2017

Persisting statistics sampling rate

When SQL Server creates or updates statistics and a sampling rate is not manually specified, SQL...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) Date: 08/07/2017

Correlating xEvents with DMVs

Since the inception of xEvents there has been the need to occasionally correlate data from xEvent...

Author: Pedro Lopes (PL) 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...

Author: Parikshit Savjani Date: 08/01/2017

A charged off loan is a loan that is declared by a creditor (usually a lending institution) that an...

Author: Ajay.MSFT 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...

Author: Parikshit Savjani Date: 06/27/2017

SQL Server Diagnostics (Preview)

EDIT (1/10/2018): As of yesterday, this preview service was shutdown. SQL Server customers...

Author: Rony Chatterjee Date: 06/23/2017

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