A very astute SQL Server professional and reader of this blog posed the following question in a comment to a prior posting entitled "Does the order of criteria the WHERE clause matter?
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Recently, I demonstrated that the order of columns in a composite index greatly determines its usefulness. Microsoft SQL Server can efficiently resolve queries using a composite index if the search criteria includes the first column in the index.
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After blogging yesterday that you can try the latest Microsoft SQL Server 2008 CTP online for free on the SqlServerBeta site, Microsoft has announced the release of a new CTP. The February CTP available!
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Had a chance to play with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 yet? If so, you've probably downloaded the most recent Community Technology Preview (CTP). It's not small either. The DVD's can take almost an hour to download at T1 speeds.
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The old adage "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" can be applied to many topics and areas of life. And while it has its origins in personal health care, nowhere is it more true than in an IT shop.
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A single column index is fairly straightforward to understand. You may have heard it compared to the index in the back of a technical book. When you want to find some information in the book, say DBCC INPUTBUFFER, you turn to the index in the back of the book and look up DBCC INPUTBUFFER.
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That's right! After a bit of a break, the Nashville SQL Server User Group is getting back together again. Our first meeting back will be this Friday, February 15th at 11:30am.
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To prepare for an upcoming technical presentation, I need to create some test data to use in a demo. I'm planning to show how different T-SQL programming techniques directly affect SQL Server's efficiency in resolving the query.
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One the more welcomed enhancements of SQL Server 2005 Notification Services was the new Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Nmo namespace. The namespace provides classes that may be used develop and administer SSNS instances and applications.
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In a prior posting, I demonstrated how the undocumented sp_MSforeachtable stored procedure can be used to iterate through each of the tables within a database. In a separate posting earlier this year, I also demonstrated how the DBCC CLEANTABLE command can be employed to reclaim space that was once consumed by variable length character columns that have been subsequently dropped.
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In my initial post here on the SQLTeam site, I mentioned that for the prior three years I had blogged on another site. That blog was almost exclusively dedicated to SQL Server Notification Services.
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In a recent post, I demonstrated how SQL Server will reuse space made available when rows are deleted from a table. This occurs automatically without any outside intervention on our part.
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A question that occasionally comes up from people who have made the switch to Microsoft SQL Server from Microsoft Access is "If I delete a bunch of rows, do I need to compact my SQL Server database?
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Even though SQL Server 2008 does not include the Notification Services (SSNS) component, it seems that companies still consider SSNS a very viable option for upcoming notification projects. I'm planning to write a blog or SQLTeam article in the near future to address some questions I'm frequently asked.
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If you've worked with Microsoft SQL Server in a production environment for any length of time, you've undoubtedly been exposed to a number of different error messages. For example, many of us are probably familiar, too familiar perhaps, with error 1205 - the dreaded "you've been chosen as the victim of a deadlock" message.
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Year in and year out, the week of the PASS Community Summit is one of the highlights of my professional life. There are a lot of good things about the Summit, far too many for me to enumerate here.
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A recent ZDNet article highlighted an event where two United Kingdom officials demonstrated just how vulnerable a new, but not updated, Microsoft Windows system can be. It took one official from the Serious Organized Crime Agency a mere 11 minutes to discover the target computer on a wireless network, crack into it using open source tools that are commonly available on the Internet, and steal password files.
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One of the things I really like about teaching technical classes is getting to know and talk with students, learning of the challenges they face and how they've addressed them. Frequently, I can learn from their experiences, too.
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As database administrators or developers, sometimes we need to perform an action on all of the tables within a database. For example, we may want to disable check constraints for all tables prior to loading a bunch of data; or perhaps we need to run DBCC CHECKTABLE for every table in our database to ensure the integrity of all pages and structures that make up the tables.
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Thanks to all of you who attended the DevLink Technical Conference in Nashville, Tennessee! It was great to see such a turnout for the event. Big kudos goes to all those who carried the load and championed this event.
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