I've had Benjamin Nevarez's Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years. I recently pulled it off the shelf to read it cover-to-cover, to see what new things I could learn. This book is supposed to take the "magic black box" feel out of the query optimizer. Chapters range from an introduction to optimization, to index selection, to hints. I remember my first introduction to the parts of the query optimizer – I was at SQL Saturday Chicago and Grant Fritchey was giving a presentation to a packed room.

This weekend I decided to take advantage of the Windows Phone Preview Program for Developers and update my Lumia 920 to Update 3 for WP8. While Update 3 was downloading and installing on my phone, I decided to install the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 which includes Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone on a Win 8.1 VM that I use for development purposes. Installation was quick and painless until the very end when I received a message stating that the installation was unable to enable Hyper-V.

Prior to the release of supporting listeners for availability groups in Azure running Windows Server virtual machines, availability groups were supported but more so in a mirroring configuration. This means, applications, services, or users would connect to the instance name and in the event of a failover, the name would have to change. Availability groups power lies in the concept that there is a complete protection level thanks to clustering and single entry points.

I've been notified I am a finalist for the category Best New Voice at the Tribal Awards. These awards are not for some tattoos on your lower back or on your biceps, but rather a collaboration of Simple-Talk and SQLServerCentral to give outstanding community contributors the chance to receive a round of applause by their fellow peers. That's right, nomination is entirely done by the tech community itself (and I somehow seemed to miss that survey).

Introduction In my quest to learn a bit more about Elasticsearch (post 1 en post 2) I will now use a .Net framework to connect to the server. I have found that NEST is the most popular out there and featurecomplete. Of course there is a blogpost by Joel Abrahamsson out there but it is a bit dated. The code Let me begin by making a model. Class Fiber Public Property Id As Integer Public Property FiberColor As FiberColorEnum Public Property Remarks As String Public Property Msps As IList(Of Msp) Public Enum FiberColorEnum Orange Red Brown Blue Green Black NoColor End Enum End Class Class Msp Public Property Id As Integer Public Property A As Decimal Public Property WaveLength As Decimal End Class``` And now that I have that out of the way I can make a connection to the server.

Introduction I tried out ElasticSearch this weekend and I needed a GUI to make it speak to me a little more, because real men use GUI’s. And I must admit that the tooling around Elasticsearch is amazing. I started with ElasticHQ. Installation Installing it can’t be much easier. Got to the getting started page and click start download. Then unzip the zipfile where you can unzip it. And then just double click the index.

Introduction I heard of Elasticsearch before but while at NDC-London I saw it put to work and I immediately fell i love with it. This is how software is supposed to work. Install and let it figure out itself. Elasticsearch is a distributed restful search and analytics server based on Lucene. So if you feel the need to add fulltext index searching to your application this is the software to go for.

Recently Packt Publishing released the book SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Blueprints authored by Marlon Ribunal (blog|twitter) and Mickey Stuewe (blog|twitter). My former colleague Valentino was the technical reviewer for this piece – he wrote about it here – so I was very interested in getting my hands on this book. Luckily Packt was kind enough to provide me with a copy so I could write a review. The book itself is advertised as a step-by-step, task-driven tutorial, a hands-on book with some real-life blueprints which doesn't waste time with boring introductions and technical obscurities.

I’m asked this question quite often while setting up availability groups and setting a preferred secondary for transaction log backups – can you recover from the full backup taken on the secondary with COPY_ONLY and also rely on a full backup taken on the primary or does the log chain become broken and prevent it? To answer the question directly, yes, you can recovery form the COPY_ONLY full as well as the full taken on the primary and still apply logs to both.

It’s the monthly blog challenge known as T-SQL Tuesday! Edition 49 is being hosted by Robert Davis, and he wants us to wait around. No, that’s not right – he wants us to write about waiting. Yeah, that’s it. You’ve read a lot about wait statistics. You know your servers have wait statistics on them. You know your applications and queries are waiting on something. Before you panic, before you go changing maxdop or rewriting queries, remember one thing: every system is going to have waits recorded.