All SQL Server Network Protocols are installed by SQL Server Setup, but may or may not be enabled. And you need to be aware that this protocols can have impact in your BizTalk Environment, for example:

• Under certain stress conditions (such as clients accessing SQL Server from the same computer), the SQL Server Shared Memory protocol may lower BizTalk Server performance.
• BizTalk Server loses connectivity with a remote SQL Server computer that houses the BizTalk Server databases and this may happen if the necessary protocols for SQL Server are not enabled.

“List of BizTalk Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions” is a Microsoft TechNet Wiki article that is intended to be a knowledge base or complete list of possible BizTalk errors and warnings with their causes and solutions for all stages/components.: different stages of development, deployment, adapters, runtime, setup and configuration…

This list can prove to be very useful for BizTalk developers but also to administrators! Because many errors described are associated to the lifecycle installation and configuration of the product as well deployment and runtime issues.

Oporto BizTalk Innovation Day is a one-day event focused purely on Microsoft BizTalk Server related topics that will take place in Casa do Infante, Oporto, Portugal on 14th March 2013. This type of event has been conducted in several major European cities since Feb 2011: Amsterdam (Netherland), Milan (Italy), and Stavanger (Norway). The last event took place in London and it was a huge success! It was fully sold out with 130 attendees from 16 different countries.
During this event participants will have an opportunity to hear about the new upcoming features in the BizTalk Server 2013 platform, integration strategies, private and public Cloud, and many more.

Sometimes people ask me how to they start learning, which leads me to always be looking for this information.

To be honest, it is more usual people asking “How can I learn to be a BizTalk Developer” than “How can I learn to be a BizTalk Administrator”, however BizTalk Administrator plays a very important role in BizTalk environments.

One of the principal needs for BizTalk Administrators is the ability to monitor the health of BizTalk environments and react promptly to possible problems, you can accomplished this by using certain tools such as: BizTalk Administration Console; BizTalk360; SCOM and many more… However, unfortunately many times, some of these tools are not available for us but we still need to accomplish this task.

In my last post I demonstrated how we could use PowerShell to monitor disk space. In this post I will explain how you can be able to monitoring SQL Agent Jobs in your BizTalk environment using PowerShell.

Today I want to talk to you about two small optimizations often forgotten but with performance implications. Some of these implications may be noticed more in the early days of our BizTalk environment when the databases are small or almost empty and often need to increase, others can have impact later when databases are large and the percentage increase is also too large.

By default BizTalk Server databases are defined with small files size and with the parameter “Autogrowth” set to:

• Increase by 1 MB for database file
• And by 10% for log file

There’s a great post from Jeroen Hendriks: Checking database autogrowth settings where it is explained howwe can check allBizTalk Server database settings using an SQL query and also Database file size - data collection so that we can recommend the right values.

One of the principal needs for BizTalk Administrators is the ability to monitor the health of BizTalk environments and react promptly to possible problems, you can accomplished this by using certain tools such as:

• BizTalk Administration Console: is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) that you can use to manage and monitor BizTalk Server, and that you can use to deploy and manage your BizTalk Server applications.
• BizTalk360: that provides a nice user friendly interface to monitoring and supporting your BizTalk environments
• SCOM (System Center Operation Manager) that can provide comprehensive monitoring for Windows systems and with the additional of BizTalk Server 2010 Management Pack, SCOM can offer also monitoring capabilities for BizTalk artifacts and BizTalk-related platform components.
• Many more…

However, unfortunately many times, some of these tools are not available for us but we still need to accomplish this task.

So how can PowerShell help us?

We are living exciting days, but hard to keep track of everything due to all the new features, product, versions... that are announced day by day…

Therefore, and with some delay, here is the list of new updates available for all different versions of BizTalk Server:

BizTalk Server 2010: Cumulative update package 5 for BizTalk Server 2010

It’s always good to know what software is installed in our environment. Sometimes we need to know what version of BizTalk is installed or what version of the Adapter Pack, x86 or x64?

And preferably be able to get this list in an easy and automated way.

As Lex Hegt mentioned earlier in his post, most of the authors at BizTalkAdminsBlogging.com also contribute at TechNet.  Besides helping to improve or add new contents in existing Wiki articles, they have their personal blogs, help users in BizTalk Forums, contribute to other BizTalk communities, they also write new Wiki articles and add new scripts to the TechNet Galleries.