SQL Server 2016

Daniel Calbimonte
SQL Server on-premises or SQL Cloud

SQL Server download guide

July 22, 2019 by

Introduction

This article serves as a SQL Server Download guide for both beginners and beyond. Some years ago, it was pretty simple to download the installer because you had all the components installed. Now, it is harder because you need to install several components, there are several versions and editions. This guide will help you to understand which version and edition needs to be downloaded.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Top 4 options for fixing Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClientUI.dll assembly error in SQL Server 2016

June 26, 2018 by

I’ve always been in favor of an orthodox strategy when it comes to applying SQL Server updates which often goes like:

  • Instead of installing SQL Server Cumulative Updates, wait for release of service packs
  • When a service pack is released, install it in phases starting from the non-production environment (i.e. DEV, UAT) to eventually roll it out on production
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Dmitry Piliugin

SQL Server 2016: Scalar UDF Estimation and Project Normalization

April 25, 2018 by

In this post, we will continue to look at the cardinality estimation changes in SQL Server 2016. This time we will talk about scalar UDF estimation. Scalar UDFs (sUDF) in SQL Server have quite bad performance and I encourage you try to avoid them in general, however, a lot of systems still use them.

Scalar UDF Estimation Change

I’ll use Microsoft sample DB AdventureworksDW2016CTP3 and write the following simple scalar function, it always returns 1, regardless of the input parameter. I run my queries against Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (SP1) (KB3182545) – 13.0.4001.0 (X64) 

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Esat Erkec

How to use parallel insert in SQL Server 2016 to improve query performance

December 8, 2017 by

Introduction

In the first part of this article, we will discuss about parallelism in the SQL Server Engine. Parallel processing is, simply put, dividing a big task into multiple processors. This model is meant to reduce processing time.

  • SQL Server can execute queries in parallel
  • SQL Server creates a path for every query. This path is execution plan
  • The SQL Server query optimizer creates execution plans
  • SQL Server query optimizer decides the most efficient way for create execution plan

Execution plans are the equivalent to highways and traffic signs of T-SQL queries. They tell us how a query is executed.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to configure Always Encrypted in SQL Server 2016 using SSMS, PowerShell and T-SQL

October 2, 2017 by

In an era of remote storage and retrieval of data, including the cloud, data security plays a vital role, especially since it’s vulnerable during the transit. Situations like database backup or copy from or to the cloud, there is always a risk of data exposure to outside world lurking around one corner or the other. We have seen a noticeable surge in the technologies around protection and security of data from the world full of unsafe hands. Efforts are being made to protect data at a very granular level of the encryption hierarchy. Protection of business data cannot be stressed upon more.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server 2016 Maintenance Plan Enhancements

September 18, 2017 by

SQL Server Maintenance Plans is a SQL Server Management Studio built-in feature that helps in creating a workflow of variant database administration tasks, which can be run automatically using a predefined schedule or manually triggered by the user.

SQL Server Maintenance Plans allow you to use typical database maintenance tasks or customize your own task using a T-SQL script that runs on the local server or group of SQL Servers, providing more flexibility to the database administration tasks.

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Thomas LeBlanc

Using Many-to-Many Relationships in SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) 2016

September 7, 2017 by

The Multidimensional Cube option of Analysis Services has handled many-to-many relationships with ease for many versions before 2016. The Tabular had a work around using DAX formulas until the release of SQL Server 2016. There are still some limitations to many-to many in Tabular but of course, there are some “tricks” to overcome the limitations. But, the many-to-many relationship will be in businesses data for many years to come. A solution has to be provided when it comes to Analysis Service databases.

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Ahmad Yaseen

In-Memory OLTP Enhancements in SQL Server 2016

August 22, 2017 by

SQL Server In-Memory OLTP, also known as Hekaton when it was introduced in SQL Server 2014, provides us with the ability to move specific database tables and suitable stored procedures into memory and compile the stored procedures into native x86 code. As a result, you can easily query these database objects directly from memory with the best performance and the least possible data access latency. In addition to that, the SQL Server Engine will no longer use the old latching and locking mechanism to control the data access concurrency. Instead, a high performance row versioning mechanism will be used to control the concurrency. This optimistic concurrency mechanism is 5 times to 20 times faster than the normal disk-based processing, due to reading the data from the memory directly.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to Configure TDE database with AlwaysOn using the Azure Key Vault in SQL 2016

July 28, 2017 by

One of the recent tasks I undertook on configuring Transparent Data encryption (TDE) using asymmetric key protection with Azure Key Vault with Always On opened a different dimension on securing data for me. Even though it seems slightly complex, if you have the key details, the steps are in fact, really straight forward.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server 2016 Memory-Optimized Tables – The Checkpoint operation

June 21, 2017 by

The SQL Server Database Engine stores data changes in the buffer pool, in memory, before applying it to the database files, for I/O performance reasons. After that, a special kind of background process, called Checkpoint, will write all of these not reflected pages, also known as Dirty Pages, to the database data and log files periodically.

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Ahmad Yaseen

Compression and decompression functions in SQL Server 2016

June 2, 2017 by

The concept of data compression is not a new on for SQL Server Database Administrators , as it is was introduced the first time in SQL Server 2008. In that SQL Server version, you were able to configure the compression at the row and page levels on the table, index, indexed view or the partition. The row and page level compression is not the best choice in all cases, as it does not work well on the Binary Large Objects (BLOB) datatypes, such as the videos, images and text documents.

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Prashanth Jayaram

SQL Server 2016 enhancements – SQL Truncate Table and Table Partitioning

April 18, 2017 by

The idea behind this article is to discuss the importance and the implication of SQL Partition and understand the SQL truncate command partitioning enhancements in SQL 2016

One of the biggest challenges for a DBA is to identify the right candidate for table partitioning, as it requires expertise in design and implementation.

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Ahmad Yaseen

How to Configure Read-Only Routing for an Availability Group in SQL Server 2016

March 23, 2017 by

The SQL Server Always On Availability Groups concept was introduced the first time in SQL Server 2012 as an enterprise-level high availability and disaster recovery solution that will replace the database mirroring feature. Always On Availability Group provides a high availability solution on the group level, where each group can contain any number of databases that can be replicated to multiple secondary servers known as Replicas.

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Some uncommon but useful T-SQL and Database Engine Enhancements in SQL Server 2016

March 20, 2017 by

SQL Server 2016 is the most advanced version of Microsoft’s Data Platform released yet. This is obviously my favorite one as it has tremendous capabilities and enormous features. These new additions not only enhance the productivity of its users (Database Developer, DBA or Application Developer), but also enable the enterprise to use its data more effectively and efficiently.

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Marko Zivkovic
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How to import/export JSON data using SQL Server 2016

March 7, 2017 by

JSON is an abbreviation for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is very popular and currently the most commonly used data exchange format. Most modern web and mobile services return information formatted as JSON text, all database web services, web browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer) return results formatted as JSON text or accept data formatted as JSON. Since external systems format information as JSON text, JSON is also stored in SQL Server 2016 as text. You can use standard NVARCHAR columns to store JSON data in SQL Server 2016.

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Craig Porteous
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How to automate SSAS tabular model processing in SQL Server 2016

March 6, 2017 by

There are many ways to process your SSAS Tabular Model. This can be achieved in SSIS using the Analysis Services Execute DDL Task or manually, through Management studio GUI but to have a little fun & make the task more flexible I’m going to script this with ASSL/TMSL & build a notification round it. We can then schedule this as a step in a SQL agent job, call it from SSIS or PowerShell.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Top 5 Deprecated Features in Reporting Services 2016

February 17, 2017 by

It’s not often that I write negative articles surrounding SQL Server’s latest release but ever since we upgraded one of our BI boxes to run SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 (SSRS 2016), I have picked up on some frustrations from my team when using the upgraded Report Manager portal due to the unavailability of features that used to exist in versions prior to SSRS 2016. I have since realized that in spite of the many exciting features and improvements introduced in SSRS 2016, there is a downside to this latest version of reporting services that is likely to leave many administrators frustrated.

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Craig Porteous

Scaling out Reporting Services & changes in SQL Server 2016

January 18, 2017 by

Scaling out Reporting services to multiple nodes, in itself, is a relatively simple process. It’s when we come to solve problems and investigate performance that we begin to see there is a lot more going on under the hood that’s not clear through implementation. There are also some foundational elements that have changed in SQL 2016 with next to no guidance from Microsoft on the changes.

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