(Paul Turley) Requirement: Allow users to enter comments after they review results from a Power Pivot model and then show the comment text in the Pivot Table report results. Here’s a quick example of the final result.

(Guillaume Fourrat) I had recently to understand why a SQL Server had repeated occurences of “SetFileIoOverlappedRange failed, GetLastError is 1314” in its errorlog.

(Dattatrey Sindol) Package Configurations are a very powerful feature of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). They enable us to handle various things dynamically at run-time. In this tip, we will take a look at few Tips and Tricks on SSIS XML Package Configurations.

(Don Mackenzie) Satisfying the needs of business users is an ongoing challenge for system designers. This article builds on the October MSDN Magazine print article, “Use Updatable Tables for Responsive Real-Time Reporting,” that describes a combination of table partitioning and columnstore indexing

(Pinal Dave) When I used to be in the consulting business, the most request session or topics always revolved around Performance Tuning. And whenever I talk to folks around what they want to get covered, they often get to a point of when and how to create efficient indexes in my database.

(Michael K. Campbell) When setting up high availability (HA) or HA+disaster recovery (DR) solutions with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, it’s critical to remember that the basic unit of failover in these scenarios is the availability group (or the group of user-defined databases).

(Scott Murray) My SQL Server Reporting Services database and server are secure and only used internally; do I really need to backup the SSRS keys? Also, is there a command line tool to handle this process?

(Tim Ford) I didn’t intend to write this article. Let me rephrase that: I did not set out to write about this subject when I sat down in front of my computer this morning. I ended up doing so as I was working on an article about poor uses for the DISTINCT keyword when I had an unexpected discovery i

(Nakul Vachhrajani) Having indexes on character columns is fairly common in OLTP systems that deal with multiple look-up values. However, indexes on character columns come with a small catch.

(Michael J. Swart) I often have conversations where a colleague wants to understand why SQL Server performs faster in some cases and slower in other cases.