SQL Server

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics. For both SQL Server and SharePoint Search there are plenty of documentation on how to optimize both the hardware and configuration of these components. In this post I will explain and show you how to use the SQL Server Resource Governor to optimize the usage of SQL Server, especially for Search.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics. For both SQL Server and SharePoint Search there are plenty of documentation on how to optimize both the hardware and configuration of these components. In this post I will explain and show you how to use the SQL Server Resource Governor to optimize the usage of SQL Server, especially for Search.

As usual a new version of a product has new requirements of all different kinds; especially when it comes to resource usage. With SharePoint 2013 there is no difference. The Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview is published and I thought I should walk through the new and updated requirements and compare them with SharePoint 2010. And also talk about some other key changes that you need to be aware of when planning your SharePoint 2013 installations.

I bet you will! The Advanced Certification Team at Microsoft Learning will start a new Live Meeting series where you can learn more about the Microsoft Certified Master and Microsoft Certified Architect programs. It will be regularly held meetings where they will go into details about the programs. The program managers will make you understand the program mission and vision, how to prepare for a certification, how to apply for participation and the value of the programs. If you’re interested in one or more of these programs I recommend you to attend one of the live meetings or watch the recordings. Of course attending the live meetings will allow you to directly ask questions to the program managers!

I guess by now we all seen or read about the new SharePoint 2010 guidance on scaling limits announced by the product group today. To sum it up it this is the new guidance on content database sizing: up to 200GB - still the recommendation 200GB to 4TB - yes, it’s been done and can be done (with the help of a skilled professional architect :-) 4TB or more - only for near read-only “record centers” with very sparse writing This looks good right, and it can be in some cases. But now on to the fine prints, which actually are written in the updated Software Boundaries and Limits article. If you read the announcement and the boundaries article you see that to be supported you need to follow a number of hard rules (such as IOPS per GB) and you must have governance rules (such as backup and restore plans) in place. Ok, if I got the IOPS needed, the best disaster recovery plans ever made and a skilled professional - should I go for the 4TB limit then? I think not, unless you really need the scale and have the hardware requirements.

Yesterday the SharePoint Team posted on their blog about a major issue with the latest Cumulative Update for SharePoint 2010 and recommending not to install it. If you have installed it you might experience major problems with User Profile services - contact Microsoft Support as soon as possible for help. So what about these Cumulative Updates? Everyone that has been in the business for some time working with products such as SharePoint and other products such as SQL Server knows that the CU’s are coming every each month or quarter. These updates contains the latest hotfixes assembled into a one package to make it easier for you to patch your server product. One problem with these CU’s (not the actual CU’s though) is that a lot of people download them and install them as soon as they are released - Fail! This is not the intended purpose of Cumulative Updates, let me explain why:

I thought I should share my experience on working with SharePoint 2010 development on Windows 7. My previous posts on installing SharePoint 2007 on Vista and Windows 7 are posts that are quite popular. The downside with the “old” SharePoint version is that it was not officially supported to install it on a client machine, but SharePoint 2010 is supported for installation on Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1 for development purposes. There are many opinions on having SharePoint 2010 installed on your client OS. Some thinks it is despicable, but I think it is great and I’ve used local installations for years now. It’s perfect for rapid development, testing and demos. In seconds you can spin up a site and show some basic stuff for a client. Of course I use virtualization when testing my final bits etc.

The day has come when Microsoft officially started to talk about the next version of Office 2010 clients and SharePoint Server 2010 (no longer Office SharePoint Server). We have since some time known that SharePoint 2010 will be supported only on a 64-bit platform, just as Exchange 2007. The new stuff revealed yesterday (as preliminary) are that not only is 64-bit required, it will only be supported on the Windows Server 2008 64-bit platform (including R2) and it will require that you have SQL Server 2008 on a 64-bit platform. There are some other interesting facts that you should check out also in the post (and on about 1.000 other blog posts), but this post is not just about these news.

A recent discussion about how the licenses of Windows, SQL and SharePoint Servers should be handled when we are developing solutions using Virtual Machines made me throw away a mail to Emma Explains Licensing. The concern was that; do we have to pay licenses for every VM or test server? That would have been insane! But I wanted to have this explained how this licensing works - a lot of you perhaps already know but I always have a hard time getting all the different licensing options and rules.

I have a few times failed to install Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Search Server Express, when I have come to a location where the SQL Server 2005 is already in place with custom configuration. The failures have occurred during the phase when the WSS is trying to create and configure the SQL Server. First time I had some troubles working it out, since I’m not a DBA, so I would like to share my solution since nothing is found on Google on this matter.

Today I attended a really interesting event at the Microsoft Stockholm location about the Microsoft Virtual Earth Platform. The event was a result of large amount of questions from partners and customers and the bi-weekly webcasts by the VE team. During the day the team from UK presented the Virtual Earth platform including the Virtual Earth AJAX controls and the MapPoint web services as well as SQL Server 2008, which contains impressive spatial data management. I was there to hear what the Virtual Earth platform could do for my customers and our solutions and during the day I noted down some really interesting ideas and pitches that I will try on them, but…

A few days ago Microsoft dropped the news that they are increasing their openness regarding interoperability. This is great news for the world of software, even though everyone has their own opinions in this matter. What now have been made public is more than 30.000 pages of documentation of the various protocols used within Microsoft server products (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007). You can find the documentation in the MSDN Library or on the Microsoft Download site.

If you are about to plan capacity for your Microsoft SharePoint 2007 topology you can get great assistance from the Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Model. What is Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007? The Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning tool for Microsoft Server products when creating distributed application deployments. The SCCP allows you to create a model of your hardware, network and applications/servers using a Model Editor. The model can then be run through a simulator which warns you of eventual bottlenecks and allows you to analyze all kinds of different data.

When you have an SQL Server which has been installed on a different port than the standard 1433 you might have trouble connecting to it if you don’t specify the port in your connection string or connection settings. This is how the syntax is, which was new to me until today. The server name (or IP) is separated using a comma sign instead of the standard colon, which are standard in URL’s and others.

Microsoft offers a number of VHD downloads at Microsoft Download Center. You can find ready to go/test virtual hard disk images of: Windows Server 2003 R2 Exchange 2007 and Microsoft Live Communications Server 2007 ISA Server 2006 SQL Server 2005 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Virtual PC demonstration The Dynamics CRM demo VHD contains a complete server with Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, SQL Server 2005, Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft CRM and Visual Studio 2005.

I have moved this blog to my own domain, http://www.wictorwilen.se/ and I decided to have it hosted at DotNetPark. DotNetPark has an excellent service at great prices. For me it was important to have ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server where I hosted my site and they have all that and more. I can easily publish the site using FTP from Visual Studio and connect to the SQL Server using the Enterprise Manager or Visual Studio. Their interface, called DotNetPanel, provides you with everything you need to host your site.You can also have a number of services installed at your request, for example how about Windows SharePoint Services!

Check this out - Stored Procedure Object Interface Layer (SPOIL). It’s a really nice framework to use when working with Stored Procedures. It helps you map stored procedures directly to methods in .NET applications.