Installing VSPerf in a server environment

Troubleshooting code issues in production is always a challenge, without affecting the performance of the application. Usually we are tied to application logging or tools like the ones from Sysinternals to have a quick pick under the hood. In this article I am going to introduce VSPerf, a component from Visual Studio with which you are able to profile applications on Windows 2012/Windows 8 or later.

SPN's deleted during cluster failover

This article is describing SPN’s disappearing while failing over a clustered instance. But this behavior can be applicable also to other services.

NUMA configuration issues on VMs running SQL Server

Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessing, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to the processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory (memory local to another processor or memory shared between processors) ¹

While configuring a SQL Server environments, it is very important to understand the underlying NUMA architecture. SQL Server has its own scheduling system, the User Mode Scheduler (UMS) which is NUMA aware. 

Transfer Logins Task fails with the error message: "Set Database failed. "

Description:

While migrating the logins with the "Transfer Logins Task" from SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) you might receive the following error message:

Error: Execution failed with the following error: "Set Database failed. ".
Error: Execution failed with the following error: "Value cannot be null. Parameter name: database".

SQL Ser 2016 Setup - The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

Symptoms:
When installing SQL Server 2016 on a domain joined computer and you have selected the "R Services (In-Database)" option, during the setup you will receive the following error message:
"The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion."

Flat File Destination failed the pre-execute phase and returned error code 0xC020200E.

On SQL Server 2012 (or newer), when you are running a SSIS package (which accesses a network share), you can retrieve the following error message:

Flat File Destination failed the pre-execute phase and returned error code 0xC020200E.
and
Cannot open the datafile "\\<remoteserver>\<remotefile>"