Is the SAN dying? The reason that I ask this question is that MSFT has unleashed technologies this year that point in that directionAlways ON Availability Groups shuns shared storageWindows 2012 has Storage Replication Technology that does not require a SANWindows 2012 has Hyper-V Replica Technology that does not require a SANPDW v2 continues to ...

Recently, I've been speaking with customers about upgrading SQL Server.  At times, some customers have a lot of Standard Edition  SQL Server 2005 / 2008 / 2008R2 in their organization and they want to see the features they get when upgrading to SQL Server 2012.  Last week, I sent out some tweets to the #sqlhelp hashtag to see if ...

Here are some issues I came across recently; most involve SSMS in some way, though Erland's assertion suggestion is a great one. And just to be clear, since I am seeing some accusations of distorting the fairness of Connect by ''asking for votes,'' I am not asking anyone to vote blindly on these items (and it's clear from last week's results that ...

Here are the items from this week that I feel deserve some attention.  I'm also adding a little bit of analysis to this.  I am always curious if my vote-pimping has any effect, so I am going to start taking a note of the ratings at the time I publish the post, and then compare them when I publish the next post.  This will give me ...

Here are the items from this week that I feel deserve some attention. ==================== Hotfixes / service packs should leave authentication mode alone I may have talked about this issue here before, I'm not sure, but I thought I was the only one who saw this happen.  This week someone else came across the issue, where they had a SQL ...

I was encouraged by some fellow MVPs (well, mostly Alexander Kuznetsov) to periodically post a set of Connect items to encourage voting for items that I found relevant but that are maybe being largely ignored.  Saturday is probably my best opportunity to do this, especially ones like today where the weather is crappy.  While I can't ...

PASS has launched its new website.  There has been a lot of hard work behind the scenes over the past year to be ready for this.  Nothing ever goes as planned, but I believe that you will agree with me that the improvements made are huge. If you are not a member, membership is now FREE at www.sqlpass.org.  The summit will be held ...

In SQL Server 2008, you can have what is called a ''Filtered Index''.  What does this mean?  An index may be created for a subset of rows in your table.  For instance you could create a filtered index for a ''state'' column if the value is ''CA'' for California; the rest of the states would not have a value.  When you create ...

The old Hardware Compatibility List which was renamed the ''Windows Catalog'' is no more.  When creating a Clustered Solution, you need to have a system that is Certified for clustering or there will be no official support.  This has been a point of pain in the past as organizations purchased a clustered solution and then one of the ...

When you start to look at SQL Server 2008, there is a sub-theme of using compression to help drive performance and usefulness.  When I hear the word compression, my first thought is ''No - I remember Stacker''.  How many years ago was that obscure reference?  Too many...  Stacker was a third party product for MS-DOS which ...