Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010

Prior to SharePoint 2010, tracking down performance bottlenecks might involve attaching a debugger to code and enabling a trace from the SQL Server Profiler. Now, with SharePoint 2010, you can use a cool new feature called Developer Dashboard. The SharePoint 2010 Developer Dashboard displays tracing and diagnostic information about page rendering and includes information about page components, controls, queries and execution time (an analogy of ASP.NET page tracing), for more details click here.

Unattached Content Database Recovery in SharePoint 2010

In earlier versions of SharePoint, to restore or recover content from a backup file, we had to restore the backed up file to a database server and had to attach that restored database to a another SharePoint farm. Then we needed to export the required content from this new temporary farm and then migrate it to the original farm where we wanted to recover it. This whole process required a huge time investment and rigorous planning.

SharePoint 2010 removes much of the administrative overhead with the inclusion of a Granular Backup and Restore feature. In the above mentioned scenario, we don't need to setup another temporary farm just to restore some content from the backup. We can simply restore a content database backup on any SQL Server instance (or can create database snapshot of the current database before making changes to the web application) and then use the unattached content database recovery feature from the Central Administration to browse the content of the backup. Then we can export it to a file and import it whenever we want, for more details click here.

Exporting/Importing Site/Library/List in SharePoint 2010

As a SharePoint Administrator, you would often need to deploy content from one site to another. So what are different options available to export the contents of a site, library, or list from SharePoint and to import it back whenever required?
Granular Backup and Restore functionalities in SharePoint 2010 have grown up tremendously from previous versions. Now you can export sites, libraries, and lists from the Central Administration tool itself. You can even use new PowerShell cmdlets to script out export and import operations. PowerShell cmdlets are optimized and provide more new features and options than the old STSADM tool. For more details, click here.

Document Versioning in SharePoint 2010

There might be a time when you would need to restore files back to an older version if any inadvertent change happens. You would also like to track changes for auditing purposes. So how does SharePoint allow creating different versions of documents? How does version history work? What are the different types of versions we can maintain for our library or list and how can we revert back to an older version? For more details click here.

Granular Backup and Restore in SharePoint 2010

In my last article, Backup and Restore in SharePoint 2010, I talked about options to backup a SharePoint farm, web applications and different components and then restore them back whenever required. But what if I have a web application with multiple site collections in it and one of the them is only getting changed frequently hence I want to backup only a specific site collection instead of backing up the complete farm or web application on regular basis? What if I want to create a copy of the site collection to another SharePoint server? What new options are available in SharePoint 2010 for site collection backup and restore?

How Check-in and Check-out work in SharePoint

SharePoint is a collaborative platform. A central feature is the ability to share documents with other users. But what if multiple users try to edit the same document at the same time? This can lead to versioning conflicts and confusion about changes. How can this be prevented?
SharePoint provides a feature called document Check-In and Check-Out. The purpose is to exclusively lock a document for modification by a user. Once the changes are complete the user can check-in the updated document to release the lock and make the changes visible to other users. For more details click here.

Running a SSIS Package from SQL Server Agent Using a Proxy Account

When we try to execute a SSIS package from a SQL Server Agent job it fails with the message "Non-SysAdmins have been denied permission to run DTS Execution job steps without a proxy account." if the account under which SQL Server Agent Service is running and the job owner is not a sysadmin on the box or the job step is not set to run under a proxy account associated with the SSIS subsystem. What is this exception about? What causes it and how do I resolve it? For more details, click here.

Getting Started with Extended Events in SQL Server 2008

In my last article, "An Overview of Extended Events in SQL Server 2008" I gave you an overview of Extended Events (XEvents) in SQL Server 2008, then I talked about its capability in terms of the number of events to trace and its deeper level of troubleshooting and finally I talked about the different components of Extended Events.
In this article, I am going to give some hands on examples to understand how this powerful tracing feature can assist you with your performance problems, for more details click here.