I recently reviewed a detailed comparison of the top 5 IaaS cloud providers and it listed Windows Azure as having the best overall value (both in cost and performance). The interesting thing about the comparison is they used a benchmarking tool called Unixbench running on Ubuntu linux. The irony of a Linux distribution running better…
I was at a client with several semi-autonomous divisions and was working on enabling Free/Busy sharing between the Exchange installations at these divisions and Office 365 in preparation for their migrations. The Remote Connectivity Analyzer added a tab specifically for Office 365 that includes a Free/Busy test which can give us more information than just…
When you are defining data warehouse dimensions, you need to ask yourself how changes to the information impact your fact tables. Type 1: This is straightforward refresh. When a value changes in the dimension table, the fields are simply overwritten and history is not kept for the column. One example of a Type 1…
Indexing strategies on data warehouses can be extremely light, depending on its usage. Most data warehouses are used solely to populate the SSAS database and, therefore, are not queried directly. In this case, the index strategy would be geared towards speeding up the ETL process. In some cases, the data warehouse may be queried directly.…
This is the third part of the series introduced at: https://www.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/archive/2013/07/01/monitoring-and-windows-azure-scom-sysctr-azure.aspx (sorry this took so long, this was a big management pack!). The focus of this blog post is to provide information on what this management pack is, what is included within this management pack, configuring the Azure Fabric management pack, how to use the…
So I have successfully installed SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012, and I am ready to play. Only I cannot connect to it from my laptop using SQL Server Management Studio. When I attempt to connect, it thinks about it for a little while and then hits me with the following error message: I…
The next meeting of the Office 365 International User Group is scheduled for 2pm Denver, CO time on August 28th! Below is the link to the Meeting invite, please add to your calendar and join us for the meeting. I am working on the agenda for the meeting and am always open to speakers and…
Enabling alerts and notifications in SQL Server can be very useful, especially when you use the SQL Agent jobs functionality. By enabling alerts and notifications, you can be notified if your SQL job fails or each time is completes. Here are the steps for enabling SQL Server Alerts and Notifications. Configure Database Mail 1. Using…
This post will highlight some of the new features and functionality that has been recently introduced for Office 365. Message Center First up is the new Message Center for Office 365. Message center is meant to augment communications from Microsoft to Office 365 Admins, not to replace e-mail and other communications methods. Below is the…
Let’s face it. We love SQL cursors. At least I do. At least I USED to. Until I started to appreciate the performance price tag associated with one. After that, I have been spending my time finding ways to circumvent the need for a cursor. But what do you do when you have a set…
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