Red Gate is a software company based in the university town of Cambridge, UK, specializing in MS SQL Server, .NET and email archiving tools. Red Gate is one of the strong supporters of the SQL Server, .NET and Exchange communities. A great example of this, are Red Gate’s well-known community web sites www.simple-talk.com and www.sqlservercentral.com. … Read more…
Newsflash: More free SQL Server training is on the way! The Mysore/Mandya Technology Group (MY-TG) organizes a series of SQL Server Webcasts which started on Saturday, September 12th, 2009 and will be taking place every Saturday for the next few weeks. To this end, every Saturday, two sessions are presented. Topics include SQL Server 2008 … Read more…
In my first post on SQL Azure (SQL Azure: A First Contact) I talked about how you can access SQL Azure using SQL Server 2008 Management Studio (SSMS). In this post, the journey continues with “walking” on the cloud using ADO .NET 🙂 Here’s the recipe! Ingredients: A valid SQL Azure account Visual Studio … Read more…
SQL Azure… Yep, that is SQL Server on the Cloud! A few days ago I received my SQL Azure (CTP) invitation code. The first thing I naturally did right after this was to create and access a database on the Cloud! I was very curious to see how I could interact with a database hosted … Read more…
I often think if the above two roles can be completely separated. From my point of view I would say that this is not 100% possible. Of course, DBAs are not developers and developers are not DBAs. The Role of the DBA The DBA is responsible for the environmental aspects of a DBMS like … Read more…
This article, discusses the usage of the “GO” command in SQL Server. But before proceeding with explaining GO, it is first necessary to understand what a “Batch” is. What is a “Batch” in SQL Server? As described in MSDN BOL, a Batch is a group of one or more Transact-SQL statements sent at the … Read more…
I got asked to present a one-hour SQL Server development session during the “24 Hours of PASS” event which starts on September 2, 2009, 00:00 GMT. The “24 Hours of PASS” is a series of live one-hour webcasts broadcast over a 24 hour period that focus on various SQL Server topics. The event is free … Read more…
SQL Server 2008 introduces among other new features and enhancements for accurately tracking Object Dependencies. This is very useful especially in cases where the user wishes to programmatically modify database objects having dependencies and therefore, he/she needs to resolve these dependencies before being able to proceed with the database object modification. For efficiently tracking dependencies … Read more…
A few days ago I delivered a Live Webcast on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Programmability and more specifically on T-SQL Enhancements. SQL Server 2008 T-SQL Enhancements Webcast’s Agenda During the Webcast I talked about the following SQL Server 2008 Programmability features: Variables Declaration and Initialization Compound Assignment Operators Large UDTs DATE, TIME, DATETIME2 New … Read more…
Along with the new data types DATE, TIME and DATETIME2 in SQL Server 2008, new and enhanced functions are also included. New Date Functions Added in SQL Server 2008 and Later The new data functions originally added in SQL Server 2008 are : SYSDATETIME SYSUTCDATETIME SYSDATETIMEOFFSET SWITCHOFFSET TODATETIMEOFFSET A more thorough explanation follows: SYSDATETIME This … Read more…
One of the things that inspires me the most in SQL Server, is the continuous enhancement of its programmability features like Data Access (Entity Framework and Data Services support), Visual Studio Integration, LINQ, Sync Framework, Project “Velocity” and of course, T-SQL Enhancements. So I think that it is time for a Live Webcast! On Wednesday, … Read more…
SQL Server 2008 is fully aligned with the collations in Windows Server 2008.To this end, it has 80 new collations which are denoted by *_100 version references. The total number of variations for these collations exceeds 1400.The purpose of this enhancement is to provide users with the most up-to-date and linguistically accurate cultural sorting conventions. … Read more…
A really neat undocumented SQL Server stored procedure is sp_MSforeachdb. This stored procedure takes as parameters SQL commands which are then executed against all databases on the current SQL Server instance. Simple Example of sp_MSforeachdb in SQL Server A simple example (“Hello World”-style 🙂 is the following which lists all the databases in the … Read more…
In this article, we will be discussing about the Windows Internal Database (SSEE), what it is and how you can access it via SQL Server Management Studio. About the Windows Internal Database The Windows Internal Database is a special variant of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. It is included with Windows Server 2008, Windows … Read more…
Another Cyprus .NET User Group special event took place a few days ago (June 18th, 2009). This event was somehow “celebratory”. It was the last offline event before summer holidays. The next offline event (within the series of Community Nights) will take place after two months time, in September 2009. During the summer months (July … Read more…