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• Meet @marcorus and @ferrarialberto at TechEd Europe 2012 #tee2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I and Alberto are in Amsterdam this week at TechEd Europe 2012. If you are here at the conference, you can meet us here: Wed, Jun 27 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM – Room G106 DBI319 - BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular Wed, Jun 27 02:15 PM – 02:30 PM – Microsoft Press Booth in the TechExpo area PowerPivot for Excel 2010 Book Signing Thu, Jun 28 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM – Room E107 Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular Fri, Jun 29 1:00 PM - 2:45 PM – Breakthrough Insight at Microsoft SQL Server Booth – TechExpo area Staff and Q&A We’ll try to visit the Microsoft Booth very often and we’ll be in the area Breakthrough Insight of SQL Server zone (see the picture to identify it). And don’t miss the PowerPivot for Excel 2010 book signing event:

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• Why Hekaton In-Memory OLTP Truly is Revolutionary

  - by merrillaldrich

  I just returned from the PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC – which was excellent, among the best I have attended – and I have had Dr. David DeWitt’s talk rolling around in my head since he gave it on Thursday. (Dr. DeWitt starts at 27:00 at that link.) I probably cannot do it justice, but I wanted to recap why Hekaton really is revolutionary, and not just a marketing buzzword. I am normally skeptical of product announcements, and I find too often that real technical innovation can be overwhelmed by the...(read more)

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• PASS Summit Location Redux

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction To quote Ronald Reagan, " There you go again ." The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) is considering locations for future PASS Summits. The apparent answer is: You Can Have The Summit Anywhere You Want... ... as long as it's in Seattle. PASS conducted a survey on this about a year ago, and I commented on the results and PASS' (mis-)interpretation of said results in a post entitled On PASS Summit Locations, Time Will Tell . "It's About Community" I think every member of the...(read more)

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• New SQL Server 2012 per core licensing – Thank you Microsoft

  - by jchang

  Many of us have probably seen the new SQL Server 2012 per core licensing, with Enterprise Edition at $6,874 per core super ceding the $27,495 per socket of SQL Server 2008 R2 (discounted to $19,188 for 4-way and $23,370 for 2-way in TPC benchmark reports) with Software Assurance at $6,874 per processor? Datacenter was $57,498 per processor, so the new per-core licensing puts 2012 EE on par with 2008R2 DC, at 8-cores per socket. This is a significant increase for EE licensing on the 2-way Xeon 5600...(read more)

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• Parameterize Charts using Excel Slicers in PowerPivot

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One new nice feature of Excel 2010 is the Slicer. Usually, slicers are used to filter data in a PivotTable. But they might be also useful to parameterize an algorithm or a chart! We discussed this technique in our book , but Alberto Ferrari wrote a post that shows how to use this technique to allow the user to select two stocks that should be compared in an Excel Chart – as you might imagine, this will work also when you will publish the workbook on SharePoint! This is the result: Nice to see that...(read more)

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• SQL Saturday 27 (Portland, Oregon)

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting for my flight to Silicon Valley California for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event. By some quirk of nature, they are asking me to Emcee the event – but that’s another post entirely.   I’m reflecting on the SQL Saturday 27 event that was just held in Portland, Oregon this last Saturday. These are not Microsoft-sponsored events – it’s truly the community at work. Think of a big user-group meeting – I mean REALLY big – held in a central location, like at a college (as ours was) or some larger, inexpensive venue like that. Everyone there is volunteering – it’s my own money and time to drive several hours to a hotel for the night, feed myself and present. It’s their own time and money for the folks that organize the event – unless a vendor or two steps in to help. It’s their own time and money for the attendees to drive a long way, spend the night and their Saturday to listen to the speakers. Why do all this?   Because everybody benefits. Every speaker learns something new, meets new people, and reaches a new audience. Every volunteer does the same. And the attendees? Well, it’s pretty obvious what they get. A 7Am to 10PM extravaganza of knowledge from every corner of the product. In fact, this year the Portland group hooked up with the CodeCamp folks and held a combined event. We had over 850 people, and I had everyone from data professionals to developers in my sessions.   So I’ll take this opportunity to do two things: to say “thank you” to all of the folks who attended, from those who spoke to those who worked and those who came to listen, and to challenge you to attend the next SQL Saturday anywhere near you. You can find the list here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/. Don’t see anything in your area? Start one! The PASS folks have a package that will show you how. Sure, it’s a big job, but the key is to get as many people helping you as possible. Even if you have only a few dozen folks show up the first time, no worries. The first events I presented at had about 20 in the room. But not this week.   See you at the Launch Event if you’re near the San Francisco area tomorrow, and see you at the Redmond SQL Saturday and TechEd if not.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• What are the most effective learning methods?

  - by BuckWoody

  After I got done speaking at the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event yesterday I came back to the hotel room for a web-meeting with some of the other teachers at the University of Washington. As teachers we are always looking to improve the knowledge transfer to our students – and the Program Director found an interesting study that I thought I might share here. Below is an un-labeled chart showing the effectiveness of learning methods according to a recent study. At the top are the labels. (“Teaching” here means students teaching each other). Try the experiment we did: place the labels where you think they’ll go. I’ll post the completed chart tomorrow. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Should vendors have an express queue for people who have a clue? What passes for support today?

  - by Greg Low

  It's good to see some airports that have queues for people that travel frequently and know what they're doing. But I'm left thinking that IT vendors need to have something similar. Bigpond (part of Telstra) in Australia have recently introduced new 42MB/sec modems on their 3G network. It's actually just a pair of 21MB/sec modems linked together but the idea is cute. Around most of the country, they work pretty well. In the middle of the CBD in Melbourne however, at present they just don't work. Having...(read more)

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• MicroTraining: Managing SSIS Connections–10 Apr 2012 at 10:00 AM EDT!

  - by andyleonard

  I am pleased to announce another free Linchpin People MicroTraining Event! On Tuesday, 10 Apr 2012 at 10:00 AM EDT, I will present Managing SSIS Connections . In this presentation, I will show you several means for managing SSIS connectivity using built-in functionality and a custom trick or two I picked up over the past few years. Want to learn more? It’s free (and no phone number required)! Register today. :{>...(read more)

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• Printing PowerPoint slides in black and white

  - by John Paul Cook

  When I do SQL Server training, sometimes students want to print all of the PowerPoint slides and use them for note taking during class. For such purposes, the background is usually better off being suppressed. This is most efficiently done by changing Print Settings as shown below: Personally I recommend that people take notes directly in the slides instead of printing them. PowerPoint has a notes area. If you do want to print slides and notes, once again use the Print Settings to specify this:...(read more)

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• Never Bet Against the Impossible

  - by BuckWoody

  My uncle used to say “If a man tells you that his car squirts milk in his eye when you lift the hood, don’t bet against that. You’ll end up with milk in your eye.” My friend Allen White tells me this is taken from a play (and was said about playing cards), but I think the sentiment holds, even in database work. I mentioned the other day that you should allow the other person to talk and actively listen before you propose a solution. Well, I saw a consultant “bet against the impossible”  the other day – and it bit her. She explained to the person telling her the problem that the situation simply couldn’t exist that way, and he proceeded to show her that it did. She got silent, typed a few things, muttered a little, and then said “well, must be something else.” She just couldn’t admit she was wrong. So don’t go there. If someone explains a problem to you with their database, listen with purpose, and then explore the troubleshooting steps you know to find the problem. But keep your absolutes to yourself. In fact, I have a friend that has recently sent me one of those. He connects to a system with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) version 2008 (if I recall correctly) and it shows a certain version number of the target system in the connection tab. Then he connects to it using SSMS 2008 R2 and gets a different number. Now, as far as I know, we didn’t change the connection string information, and that’s provided by the target system, so this is impossible. But I won’t tell him that. Not until I look a little more. :) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• The case against INFORMATION_SCHEMA views

  - by AaronBertrand

  In SQL Server 2000, INFORMATION_SCHEMA was the way I derived all of my metadata information - table names, procedure names, column names and data types, relationships... the list goes on and on. I used the system tables like sysindexes from time to time, but I tried to stay away from them when I could. In SQL Server 2005, this all changed with the introduction of catalog views. For one thing, they're a lot easier to type. sys.tables vs. INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES? Come on; no contest there - even...(read more)

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• TechEd 2010 Day Four: Learning how to help others learn

  - by BuckWoody

  I do quite a few presentations, and teach at the University of Washington, and also teach other classes. But I'm always learning from others how to help others learn. At events like TechEd I have access to some of the best speakers around, so I try to find out what they do that works. I attended a great session by allen White, in which he demonstrated a set of PowerShell scripts. He said that Dan Jones of the Microsoft Manageability team told him while he demonstrated a script he needed to provide some visual way to represent the process. Allen used one of the oldest visualizations around - a flowchart. It was the first time I'd seen one used to illustrate a PowerShell script, and it was very effective. I'm totally stealing the idea. All of us are teachers - we help others on our team understand what we're up to. Make sure you make notes for what you find effective in dealing with you, and then meld that into your own way of teaching. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Do you know your DNS server?

  - by John Paul Cook

  If you don’t know your DNS server is valid, you need to find out before July 9. The FBI found rogue DNS servers and replaced them with clean, safe DNS servers to protect the public. These safe, clean servers will be turned off on July 9, 2012. If your computer was compromised to use the rogue servers, it will stop resolving DNS queries on July 9 when the clean servers are turned off. The FBI has provided full technical details at http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911/DNS-changer-malware.pdf...(read more)

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• PowerPivot: editing measures when you reach 45

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  I have always been used to small fonts but now, as I am getting older, I’d better admit that a greater font is much more relaxing. Editing PowerPivot measures has always been a pain, since all you have available is a small text box and I hate to admit that I got used to leverage ZoomIt for a long time to edit measures. Today I ran into a great Windows feature that I did not know about: ctrl-wheel on the mouse inside a textbox increases the font size of the text box. It seems to work with most textboxes...(read more)

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• Microsoft BI Conference 2011 in Lisbon

  - by AlbertoFerrari

  Anyone interested in BI from Portugal or Spain should not miss the Microsoft BI Conference 2011 in Lisbon : one full day ( March, 25, 2011 ) with three tracks on Business Intelligence: Decision Makers BI pros Intro to BI. I am going to present two sessions on PowerPivot: one is a nice deep dive into DAX for BI pros, the other is about self service BI for decision makers. Titles and the complete agenda will be published in the next days, but I suggest to save the date. The full event is free and it...(read more)

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• Investigating on xVelocity (VertiPaq) column size

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

    In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll show how to investigate on columns size of an existing Tabular database so that you can find the most important columns to be optimized. A first approach can be looking in the DataDir of Analysis Services and look for the folder containing the database. Then, look for the biggest files in all subfolders and you will find the name of a file that contains the name of the most expensive column. However, this heuristic process is not very optimized. A better approach is using a DMV that provides the exact information. For example, by using the following query (open SSMS, open an MDX query on the database you are interested to and execute it) you will see all database objects sorted by used size in a descending way. SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_STORAGE_TABLE_COLUMN_SEGMENTS ORDER BY used_size DESC You can look at the first rows in order to understand what are the most expensive columns in your tabular model. The interesting data provided are: TABLE_ID: it is the name of the object – it can be also a dictionary or an index COLUMN_ID: it is the column name the object belongs to – you can also see ID_TO_POS and POS_TO_ID in case they refer to internal indexes RECORDS_COUNT: it is the number of rows in the column USED_SIZE: it is the used memory for the object By looking at the ration between USED_SIZE and RECORDS_COUNT you can understand what you can do in order to optimize your tabular model. Your options are: Remove the column. Yes, if it contains data you will never use in a query, simply remove the column from the tabular model Change granularity. If you are tracking time and you included milliseconds but seconds would be enough, round the data source column to the nearest second. If you have a floating point number but two decimals are good enough (i.e. the temperature), round the number to the nearest decimal is relevant to you. Split the column. Create two or more columns that have to be combined together in order to produce the original value. This technique is described in VertiPaq optimization article. Sort the table by that column. When you read the data source, you might consider sorting data by this column, so that the compression will be more efficient. However, this technique works better on columns that don’t have too many distinct values and you will probably move the problem to another column. Sorting data starting from the lower density columns (those with a few number of distinct values) and going to higher density columns (those with high cardinality) is the technique that provides the best compression ratio. After the optimization you should be able to reduce the used size and improve the count/size ration you measured before. If you are interested in a longer discussion about internal storage in VertiPaq and you want understand why this approach can save you space (and time), you can attend my 24 Hours of PASS session “VertiPaq Under the Hood” on March 21 at 08:00 GMT.

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• SSIS 2012 Moving and Resizing

  - by andyleonard

  Occasionally someone will email or post a comment about how all MVPs are Microsoft shills. I’m sure I enjoy those comments about as much as the Developer Teams at Microsoft. Let me start by saying that’s simply not true. In fact, it is completely off the mark – at least when it comes to the MVPs I know and with whom I interact. If anything, we are Microsoft’s harshest critics. Just last week, I sent someone at Microsoft an email with the following complaint (paraphrased): I do not like chasing down...(read more)

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• Windows 8 client virtualization

  - by John Paul Cook

  Hyper-V is coming to Windows 8, but you must have a processor that supports SLAT. Virtual machines created with Virtual PC aren’t easily transferred to Windows 2008 Hyper-V and vice-versa. With Windows 8, it will be easy to move vhds from Windows 8 on your laptop or desktop to Windows 8 server and back again. To find out if your processor supports SLAT, run coreinfo –v from a command window running as administrator. Download coreinfo from here . My MacBook Pro supports SLAT as this output shows:...(read more)

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• redirect subdomain(weblog) to new domain that can't access .htccss 301

  - by fafa

  I've a problem that I can't find the solution of it in web. I have a blog that has PR 1 and it's subdomain "aaaa.domain.com" that "domain.com" is a blog server. and now i buy a domain "newdomain.com" i want tell google webmaster to redirect old subdomain to this new domain and load trafic to my new domane. but i can't access .htccss to redirect 301. all thing that i can do is put html code in the html . now how can i do this. when i use "Change of Address" in goole webmaster it say:"Restricted to root level domains only" . sorry for bad English.

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• PASS Summit 2010 BI Workshop Feedbacks

  - by Davide Mauri

  As many other speakers already did, I’d like to share with the SQL Community the feedback of my PASS Summit 2010 Workshop. For those who were not there, my workshop was the “BI From A-Z” and the main objective of that workshop was to introduce people in the BI world not only from a technical point of view but insist a lot on the methodological and “engineered” approach. The will to put more engineering in the IT (and specially in the BI field) is something that has been growing stronger and stronger in me every day for of this last 5 years since is simply envy the fact that Airbus, Fincatieri, BMW (just to name a few) can create very complex machine “just” using putting people together and giving them some rules to follow (Of course this is an oversimplification but I think you get what I mean). The key point of engineering is that, after having defined the project blueprint, you have the possibility to give to a huge number of people, the rules to follow, the correct tools in order to implement the rules easily and semi-automatically and a way to measure the quality of the results. Could this be done in IT? Very big question, so my scope is now limited to BI. So that’s the main point of my workshop: and entry-level approach to BI (level was 200) in order to allow attendees to know the basics, to understand what tools they should use for which purpose and, above all, a set of rules and tools in order to make a BI solution scalable in terms of people working on it, while still maintaining a very good quality. All done not focusing only on the practice but explaining the theory behind to see how it can help *a lot* to build a correct solution despite the technology used to implement it. The idea is to reach a point where more then 70% of the work done to create a BI solution can be reused even if technologies changes. This is a very demanding challenge nowadays with the coming of Denali and its column-aligned storage and the shiny-new DAX language. As you may understand I was looking forward to get the feedback since you may have noticed that there’s a lot of “architectural” stuff in IT but really nothing on “engineering”. So how the session could be perceived by the attendees was really unknown to me. The feedback could also give a good indication if the need of more “engineering” is something I feel only by myself or if is something more broad. I’m very happy to be able to say that the overall score of 4.75 put my workshop in the TOP 20 session (on near 200 sessions)! Here’s the detailed evaluations: How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? 4.75 Answer:    # of Responses 3    1         4    12        5    42               How would you rate the Speaker's presentation skills? 4.80 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 1         4 : 9         5 : 45               How would you rate the Speaker's knowledge of the subject? 4.95 Answer:    # of Responses 4 :  3         5 : 52               How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session? 4.75 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 2         4 : 10         5 : 43               How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session? 4.44 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 7         4 : 17        5 : 31               How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials? 4.62 Answer:    # of Responses 4 : 21        5 : 34 The comments where all very positive. Many of them asked for more time on the subject (or to shorten the very last topics). I’ll make treasure of these comments and will review the content accordingly. We’ll organize a two-day classes on this topic, where also more examples will be shown and some arguments will be explained more deeply. I’d just like to answer a comment that asks how much of what I shown is “universally applicable”. I can tell you that all of our BI project follow these rules and they’ve been applied to different markets (Insurance, Fashion, GDO) with different people and different teams and they allowed us to be “Adaptive” against the customer. The more the rules are well defined and the more there are tools that supports their implementations, the easier is to add new people to the project and to add or change solution features. Think of a car. How come that almost any mechanic can help you to fix a problem? Because they know what to expect. Because there a rules that allow them to identify the problem without having to discover each time how the car has been implemented build. And this is of course also true for car upgrades/improvements. Last but not least: thanks a lot to everyone for coming!

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• Printing PowerPoint slides in black and white

  - by John Paul Cook

  When I do SQL Server training, sometimes students want to print all of the PowerPoint slides and use them for note taking during class. For such purposes, the background is usually better off being suppressed. This is most efficiently done by changing Print Settings as shown below: Personally I recommend that people take notes directly in the slides instead of printing them. PowerPoint has a notes area. If you do want to print slides and notes, once again use the Print Settings to specify this:...(read more)

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• Did You Know? I'm doing 3 more online seminars with SSWUG!

  - by Kalen Delaney

  As I told you in April , I recorded two more seminars with Stephen Wynkoop, on aspects of Query Processing. The first one will be broadcast on June 30 and the second on August 27. In between, we'll broadcast my Index Internals seminar, on July 23. Workshops can be replayed for up to a week after the broadcast, and you can even buy a DVD of the workshop. You can get more details by clicking on the workshop name, below, or check out the announcement on the SSWUG site at http://www.sswug.org/editorials/default.aspx?id=1948...(read more)

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• SQL Saturday 43 (Redmond, WA) Review

  - by BuckWoody

  Last Saturday (June 12th) we held a “SQL Saturday” (more about those here) event in Redmond, Washington. The event was held at the Microsoft campus, at the Mixer in our new location called the “Commons”. This is a mall-like area that we have on campus, and the Mixer is a large building with lots of meeting rooms, so it made a perfect location for the event. There was a sign to find the parking, and once there they had a sign to show how to get to the building. Since it’s a secure facility, Greg Larsen and crew had a person manning the door so that even late arrivals could get in. We had about 400 sign up for the event, and a little over 300 attend (official numbers later). I think we would have had a lot more, but the sun was out – and you just can’t underestimate the effect of that here in the Pacific Northwest. We joke a lot about not seeing the sun much, but when a day like what we had on Saturday comes around, and on a weekend at that, you’d cancel your wedding to go outside to play in the sun. And your spouse would agree with you for doing it. We had some top-notch speakers, including Clifford Dibble and Kalen Delany. The food was great, we had multiple sponsors (including Confio who seems to be at all of these) and the attendees were from all over the professional spectrum, from developers to BI to DBA’s. Everyone I saw was very engaged, and when I visited room-to-room I saw almost no one in the halls – everyone was in the sessions. I also saw a much larger Microsoft presence this year, especially from Dan Jones’ team. I had a great turnout at my session, and yes, I was wearing an Oracle staff shirt. I did that because I wanted to show that the session I gave on “SQL Server for the Oracle DBA” was non-marketing – I couldn’t exactly bash Oracle wearing their colors! These events are amazing. I can’t emphasize enough how much I appreciate the volunteers and how much work they put into these events, and to you for coming. If you’re reading this and you haven’t attended one yet, definitely find out if there is one in your area – and if not, start one. It’s a lot of work, but it’s totally worth it.       Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Using the @ in SQL Azure Connections

  - by BuckWoody

  The other day I was working with a client on an application they were changing to a hybrid architecture – some data on-premise and other data in SQL Azure and Windows Azure Blob storage. I had them make a couple of corrections - the first was that all communications to SQL Azure need to be encrypted. It’s a simple addition to the connection string, depending on the library you use. Which brought up another interesting point. They had been using something that looked like this, using the .NET provider: Server=tcp:[serverName].database.windows.net;Database=myDataBase; User ID=LoginName;Password=myPassword; Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True; This includes most of the formatting needed for SQL Azure. It specifies TCP as the transport mechanism, the database name is included, Trusted_Connection is off, and encryption is on. But it needed one more change: Server=tcp:[serverName].database.windows.net;Database=myDataBase; User ID=[LoginName]@[serverName];Password=myPassword; Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True; Notice the difference? It’s the User ID parameter. It includes the @ symbol and the name of the server – not the whole DNS name, just the server name itself. The developers were a bit surprised, since it had been working with the first format that just used the user name. Why did both work, and why is one better than the other? It has to do with the connection library you use. For most libraries, the user name is enough. But for some libraries (subject to change so I don’t list them here) the server name parameter isn’t sent in the way the load balancer understands, so you need to include the server name right in the login, so the system can parse it correctly. Keep in mind, the string limit for that is 128 characters – so take the @ symbol and the server name into consideration for user names. The user connection info is detailed here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336268.aspx Upshot? Include the @servername on your connection string just to be safe. And plan for that extra space…  

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