SQL Server 2014 is the next generation of Microsoft’s information platform, with new features that deliver faster performance, expand capabilities in the cloud, and provide powerful business insights.  In this blog posting I want to give you an overview about the various performance related enhancements that are introduced.

Lock Priorities

As you might know, SQL Server gives you in the Enterprise Edition Online operations, or as I call them “Almost Online Operations”. They are almost online, because internally SQL Server still has to acquire some locks, which can lead to blocking situations. For that reason SQL Server 2014 introduces Lock Priorities, where you can control how SQL Server should react, if such a blocking situation occurs.

Buffer Pool Extensions

The idea about Buffer Pool Extensions is very easy: expand the Buffer Pool with a paging file that is stored on very fast storage, like SSD drives. The Buffer Pool Extensions are coming quite handy, if you don’t have the ability to physically add more additional RAM to your database server.

Resource Governor

Resource Governor was introduced first back with SQL Server 2008, but wasn’t really a mature technology, because you had no possibility to govern I/O operations on the storage level, and you also had no chance to limit the size of the Buffer Pool for a specific workload group. With SQL Server 2014 things are changing, because you can now throttle I/O operations. Limiting Buffer Pool usage is still not possible, but hey who knows what comes in SQL Server 2016 .

Clustered ColumnStore Indexes

One of the hottest enhancements in SQL Server 2014 is the introduction of Clustered ColumnStore Indexes , which is an amazingly new way concept how to deal with ColumnStore data in SQL Server. And in addition the Clustered ColumnStore Index can be also changed directly – without using tricks like Partition Switching.

In-Memory OLTP

With In-Memory OLTP Microsoft claims that the performance of your workload can be improved up to 100x. Awesome! Everything is now stored directly in the memory, without touching your physical storage anymore (besides the transaction log, if you want). And in addition In-Memory OLTP is based on so-called Lock Free Data Structures, means locking, blocking, latching, and spinlocking is just gone. Of course, there are side-effects and even limitations with this promising approach…

Delayed Transactions

It doesn’t matter how good the throughput of your workload is, the final barrier and bottleneck is almost every time the transaction log. Because of the Write-Ahead Logging mechanism used by SQL Server, a transaction must be always written physically to the transaction log, before the transaction is committed. When your transaction log is on slow storage, your performance and throughput will suffer. For that reason SQL Server 2014 implements so-called Delayed Transactions.

Cardinality Estimation

Cardinality Estimation  is the most important thing in a relational database, because these estimations are feeded into the Query Optimizer, whose job it is to produce a good-enough execution plan. With SQL Server 2014 Microsoft has rewritten the cardinality estimator completely from scratch to overcome some limitations based on the history of this very important component.

Recently one of my application website went down. I checked all the basic connectivity troubleshooting on my SQL Server 2012 Hosting and seem everything was looking and working fine. Finally, I found the problem with the browser service but that’s also in running state.

Error from the event viewer:

The quick solution is rebooting the SQL browser (Start –>All programs–>Microsoft SQL server 200X–>Configuration tools –>SQL server configuration Manager) without rebooting SQL service. I searched and found a couple of MS links (KB-2526552 And SQLBrowser Unable to start) but, I did not apply it. I used another way that is also a permanent fix.

Troubleshooting ways and a permanent fix:

For me it’s a named instance and listening a dynamic port and DBAs knows the browser service is mainly for named instance. From the local machine we can connect the server through SSMS by using server name and server name + port number. But, other than local machine you cannot connect the server by using server name. (You can test that by connecting some other server or better install only SSMS on the application server and try to connect it) so I went to the application server and opened a connection string as expected the data source only has the server name. So We changed it from Datasource “from Data Source=Servername\Instance to Data Source= Servername\Instance,port” Ex: Muthu1\SQL1,5432.

Application team made a standard to always include a port number in the connection string block i.e. FQDN. 

A Basic SQL Connectivity checks:

- Check SQL service is running or not and try to connect through SSMS from local and remote

- Check TCP/IP protocol enabled on SQL server configuration manager and find the port number

- Connect using a server+port number from SSMS local and remote

- For firewall block/port not opened you can check through command prompt TELNET server port ex: TELNET server 1433

- Check remote connections are enabled & SQL Browser service is running (For a named instance which is not using FQDN)

- Check you have any alias/DNS name.

We have been using plus sign (+) operator for concatenating string values for years in SQL Server with its limitations (or more precisely, its standard behaviors). The biggest disadvantage with this operator is, resulting NULL when concatenating with NULLs. This can be overcome by different techniques but it needs to be handled. Have a look on below code;

 -- FullName will be NULL for 
 -- all records that have NULL 
 -- for MiddleName 
 SELECT  
   BusinessEntityID 
   , FirstName + ' ' + MiddleName + ' ' + LastName AS FullName 
 FROM Person.Person 
 -- One way of handling it 
 SELECT  
   BusinessEntityID 
   , FirstName + ' ' + ISNULL(MiddleName, '') + ' ' + LastName AS FullName 
 FROM Person.Person 
 -- Another way of handling it 
 SELECT  
   BusinessEntityID 
   , FirstName + ' ' + COALESCE(MiddleName, '') + ' ' + LastName AS FullName 
 FROM Person.Person 

SQL Server 2012 introduced a new function called CONCAT that accepts multiple string values including NULLs. The difference between CONCAT and (+) is, CONCAT substitutes NULLs with empty string, eliminating the need of additional task for handling NULLs. Here is the code.

 SELECT  
   BusinessEntityID 
   , CONCAT(FirstName, ' ', MiddleName, ' ', LastName) AS FullName 
 FROM Person.Person 

If you were unaware, make sure you use CONCAT with next string concatenation for better result. However, remember that CONCAT substitutes NULLs with empty string which is varchar(1), not as varchar(0).

There are plenty of tutorials out there that explain how to configure an MS SQL Server alias. However, since none of them worked for me, I wrote this post so I'll be able to look it up in the future. Here's what finally got it working for me.

My Use Case

In my development team at work, some of our local database instances have different names. Manually adapting the connection string to my current local development machine every single time is not an option for me because it's error-prone (changes might get checked into version control) and outright annoying.

The connection string we're using is defined in our Web.config like this:

<add name="SqlServer" connectionString="server=(local)\FooBarSqlServer;…"   

providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />

This is the perfect use case for an alias. Basically, an alias maps an arbitrary database name to an actual database server. So I created an alias for FooBarSqlServer, which allows me to use the above (unchanged) connection string to connect to my local (differently named) SQL Server instance. That was when I ran into the trouble motivating me to write this post. The alias simply didn't work: I couldn't use it to connect to the database, neither in our application nor using SQL Server Management Studio.

The Working Solution

I googled around quite a bit and finally found the solution in Microsoft's How to connect to SQL Server by using an earlier version of SQL Server: The section Configure a server alias to use TCP/IP sockets pointed out that I had to look up the specific port number used by the TCP/IP protocol:

Here's how you find the port number that's being used by TCP/IP on your machine:

1) Open the SQL Server Configuration Manager.

2) Expand SQL Server Network Configuration and select Protocols for <INSTANCE_NAME>.

3) Double-click on TCP/IP and make sure Enabled is set to Yes.

4) Remember whether Listen All is set to Yes or No and switch to the IP Addresses tab.

- Now, if Listen All was set to Yes (which it was for me), scroll down to the IPAll section at the very bottom of the window and find the value that's displayed for TCP Dynamic Ports.

- If Listen All was set to No, locate the value of TCP Dynamic Ports for the specific IP address you're looking for.

You'll have to copy this port number into the Port No field when you're configuring your alias. Note: that you'll have to set the Alias Name to the exact value used in your connection string. Also, if you're not using the default SQL Server instance on your development machine (which I am), you'll need to specify its name in the Server field in addition to the server name. In my case, that would be something like YourDirectory\NAMED_SQL_INSTANCE. Remember to also define the alias for 32-bit clients when your database has both 64-bit and 32-bit clients.

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In this article, I've highlighted the 5 features which I consider to be the most helpful all around. Whether you work by yourself or on a team, these new features can save you time and improve your development experience.

1. Prototyping and Throw-Away Applications

One of the first things you may notice when starting Visual Studio 2013 is that the "New Project" window looks a bit different, as shown in figure below. When creating a new project, the location and name of the solution no longer have to be set immediately. In previous versions, the project's name and location had to be set before it was created, even if you were just testing something out and planned to delete it right away. For those who create many new projects, that meant either an extra step to delete the project or having a cluttered project directory.

Visual Studio now works more like Microsoft Office applications, allowing you to create a project and start coding, and defer the decision of if/where to save it.

2. Peek Definitions

Peek Definitions lets you take a quick peek at a class or method definition without opening the file. You may be accustomed to hitting F12 to go to an object's definition, but now if you hit Alt+F12 instead, you will be able to take a peek at the definition just below its usage. As shown in figure below, I had my cursor on "prod.Name" when I hit Alt+F12, bringing up the definition of the Product class right inside my code window.

3. Improved Navigation and Search

Along the lines of Peek Definitions, you can also try hitting CTRL+, which will behave differently depending on the position of your cursor. If the cursor is on a blank line, you can just start typing anything and it will begin searching for what you're typing. If the cursor is on some code, that object will be automatically typed into the search box to get you started. Take a look at figure below to see search function looks like. You can then use your arrow keys or mouse to navigate to any of the results of the search.

4. CodeLens

CodeLens is a feature that will be available only in Visual Studio Ultimate edition. By default, the number of times a property or method is referenced by your code is shown above that property or method. This information can be helpful when changing existing code, since you'll know if the method is called from many places or just a handful. In larger projects, especially ones where you're not familiar with the entire codebase, this can be a big time saver. The number of references is shown in a small font above each property or method on your class, as shown in figure below. Clicking on the number of references will show you all of the methods that call it, making it easy to find and navigate to those sections of your code.



While not shown here, CodeLens also has some nice Team Foundation Server (TFS) integration. If you're using TFS, it will allow you to see commit history and unit tests targeting the code in question.

5. Scroll Bar Customization

In Visual Studio 2013, the scroll bar can now be customized to give you a better overview of large files. It can be set to show various annotations, such as changes, errors, breakpoints and more. Optionally, it can be set to "map mode," which will give you a zoomed-out representation of your code right on the scroll bar itself. The difference between bar mode (the default) and map mode can be seen in figure below.


The options screen, is accessible by going to Tools > Options > Text Editor > All Languages > Scroll Bars.

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New API For Refreshing Data in LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2013

You can get Visual Studio 2013 here: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/2013-downloads.

The Sample Project

When we open it up, it will be converted to the new Visual Studio 2013 format. However, to get it to run we have right-click on the first project

The API
The new refresh() API consists of  two methods that each return a Promise object.

• Refresh()
  Asynchronously loads the first page of items into this collection and returns a promise that will be fulfilled when the first page is loaded. Existing results will be refreshed on the first page and subsequent pages unless load() is called again.
  
• Refresh(navigationPropertyNames)
  Updates the entity with values from the data source if the entity is not changed.
  <param name="navigationPropertyNames" type="Array" optional="true">. An array of names of navigation properties to be included. An empty array means no properties will be included. If not specified, all reference properties are included.

Sample usage

• Refresh the Order entity and its Customer, Employee, Shipper

        screen.Order.details.refresh();

• Refresh only the Order entity

        screen.Order.details.refresh([]);

• Refresh the Order entity and its Customer

        screen.Order.details.refresh(["Customer"]);

The Problem

Let’s say we have a field on the Order entity that is updated in the save pipeline when an associated OrderDetail record is updated.

In the OrderDetail record, the updating event looks like this:

We can update an OrderDetail record

Save the changes. But the time is unchanged on the screen (even though it has been updated in the database).

The Solution

We can instantly have the entity updated if we use the new refresh() method.

To do so requires us to implement our own code to open the edit screen (so we have an opportunity to implement the refresh code).
We select the Item Tap action for the Orders list.

Select Write my own method.

We then edit the code for the method we created.
We use the following code:

myapp.Main.Order_ItemTap_execute = function (screen) {
    myapp.showAddEditOrder(null, {
        beforeShown: function (addEditOrderScreen) {
            // Set the Order on the AddEditOrder screen
            // to the selected Order on the Main screen
            addEditOrderScreen.Order = screen.Orders.selectedItem;}
        },
        afterClosed: function (addEditScreen, navigationAction) {
            // If the user commits the change,
            // update the selected order on the Main screen
            if (navigationAction === msls.NavigateBackAction.commit) {
 // *****************************************
// The .refresh() method refreshes the Order
screen.Orders.selectedItem.details.refresh();
            }
        }
    });
};

When we update the record we will see the date instantly updated without the need to refresh the entire screen.