Late yesterday afternoon, Microsoft posted to their download site a Release Candidate (RC1) for the Notification Services Components Package. This is essentially the same package that was released back in February 2007, with one really major exception - it supports SQL Server 2008!
Read more →
Sometimes it seems that pursuing certification in a technology is tantamount to running on treadmill. On a treadmill you spend countless hours toiling away, working up a sweat and exerting yourself beyond what you thought you could do.
Read more →
My latest article for Simple-Talk is online, Creating Technical Presentations. I'd love to hear what you think either in the comments below, or in the comments on the Simple-Talk web site.
Read more →
Late last year, I posted a blog that described the undocumented sp_MSforeachtable stored procedure in Microsoft SQL Server and how it could be used to execute commands on each table within a database.
Read more →
My good friend Kevin Kline recently posed a question on one of his blogs: what is the best frequency, depth, and type of blog posting? Are readers most interested in more thorough postings that are more akin to full fledged magazine articles, with the understanding that those will appear far less often since they are more time consuming to create?
Read more →
Thanks to everyone who came to my Writing Better Queries session at DevLink this afternoon! I truly appreciate that you took time of your busy schedule to attend! I hope it was worth your while.
Read more →
While teaching a Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services class in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week, one of the students asked to see an example of a report that uses a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet as its datasource.
Read more →
In a prior post, I demonstrated how to use conditional formatting techniques to change the background color of every other row in tabular report. In that example, I used the Immediate If (IIF) function to change the BackgroundColor property of the odd rows to silver.
Read more →
One common question from many of those who are relatively new to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is how to alternate the background color of detail rows in a table data region.
Read more →
Fellow SQL Server enthusiast and online friend of mine, Jonathan Kehayias is very active in the MSDN Forums. He frequently provides good, insightful information to those seeking advice.
In response to a recent question in the Database Engine Forum, Jonathan provided a good example how a process marked as sleeping can still hold locks on a SQL Server resource.
Read more →
Next week at the Nashville SQL Server User Group, John Rives of Amniox is going to speak about using SQL Server with clustered virtualization. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to attend due to a prior commitment, however I have spoken with John about his presentation and it definitely sounds promising.
Read more →
As Geoff and Derek have already posted, SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing (RTM'd) yesterday. Eager to get the bits? They're available from the MSDN download site. Cheers!
Read more →
Business Intelligence Developers Studio (aka BIDS) for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services makes creating engaging and dynamic reports nearly trivial in some respects. You can create drill-down and drill-through reports with just a few mouse clicks.
Read more →
Thanks to everyone who attended my SSRS class in Charlotte this week. As promised, here is a list of online resources that may prove useful to you as you work with Reporting Services.
Read more →
As database administrators and developers, it's our job to know the in's and out's of the data in our charge. Whether we're designing entity relationships to support underlying business requirements, optimizing indexes to achieve the best response times, or writing a query to retrieve the right data in the most efficient manner, having an intimate knowledge of the database is key.
Read more →
I was searching for something online the other day and stumbled upon this TechNet article - Working with tempdb in SQL Server 2005. It's a good little article and I wanted to share it with you.
Read more →
I was recently perusing the the MSDN SQL Server forums and noticed a question about localization of Microsoft SQL Server messages. I replied to the post with a mention of the sys.
Read more →
Over the years, I've had the opportunity to attend, and even speak at, many technical conferences both here in the United States and abroad. Some of the conferences had only a couple of hundred attendees while others boasted of attendance figures in 5 digit range.
Read more →
Here's a presentation that I gave yesterday afternoon at DevTeach/SQLTeach. It's called Tips & Tricks for Writing Better Queries. It's very similar to the presentation I gave a month or so ago at the Nashville SQL Server User Group meeting.
Read more →
Thanks to everyone who attended my "Identifying Performance Bottlenecks" session this morning at DevTeach/SQLTeach. As promised, here is the PowerPoint slide deck I used during the presentation. Regarding the question of on the performance of LINQ, Bob Beauchemin recently posted a series of blogs entries on the topic.
Read more →