It used to be very difficult to obtain hotfixes for SQL Server (sometimes even to learn about their existence), and they were often unsupported. They have made extremely great strides in this area, and in general, I find the new procedure much more convenient...(read more)

Late last night, the SQL Server Release Services team announced new cumulative updates for both SQL Server 2008 RTM and SQL Server 2008 SP1. There are too many fixes to mention, but I once again notice the trend that the ''newer'' branch (SP1) has more...(read more)

About two months ago, I began planning a cluster migration for one of our primary SQL Server 2005 clusters to newer hardware, and a simultaneous upgrade to SQL Server 2008 SP1. The old system runs Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise, 32-bit, with 4 dual-core...(read more)

During maintenance windows and against test databases, I have been applying page compression to some largish tables (~200+ million rows, ~50GB). These tables are heavy write and medium read, but all writes are inserts (no updates). Clustered indexes are...(read more)

To persuade your boss to embrace an upgrade to SQL 2008, you need to know which features have high Return On Investment. They may have seen presentations talking about features like Spatial, or MERGE (and been quite impressed), but they may well have left those presentations thinking about the effort that’s would be involved in rewriting ...

This morning I decided to install Visual Studio 2010 on one of my development VMs. I have several processes in our production environment where, for convenience, I have SQL Server Agent calling batch files that call C# command line programs, VBScript...(read more)

Sorry I have been quiet recently; been working very hard for the past two weeks on a migration of an old, tried SQL Server 2005 database to a brand new 2008 cluster with faster SAN undercarriage, double the memory and twice as many CPUs. I'll blog more...(read more)

My talk on StreamInsight is up next. I’ll try to blog more about that later. For now, I want to mention more about SQLBits itself. This is by far the largest SQL-only conference I’ve attended (I haven’t been to SQL-PASS yet), and it’s great to be involved. Yesterday I had an all-day seminar about the new items for Developers in SQL 2008. It was a ...

I've been busy for the last few weeks putting together a "manifesto" whitepaper about the .NET-based data access stacks and also the possibilities for .NET programmers in the SQL Server product itself. The whitepaper's direct link is here, although its also available via both the MSDN Data Developer Center and the SQL ...

For those of you watching over the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed an out-of-band, mid-CU-cycle update to SQL Server 2008 SP1 . The fix to a cluster issue was available only for the SP1 branch; RTM users had to employ a kludgy workaround (see...(read more)