My career While I am no Kalen or Paul or Itzik or Erland (or… the list could go on and on), I am very thankful that I have been able to shape a moderately successful career around SQL Server. More importantly, I am thankful that the market continues to provide […]
Can we improve on CHECKSUM()? Mike C# is not happy with the reliability of CHECKSUM() and asks for a better function that has less (or no) chance of collisions. #513376 : A Better Collision-Free Hash Function for Comparing Rows of Data Service termination and fatal exceptions are bad, m'kay? Victor […]
SSMS needs to support today's (and tomorrow's) number of cores Apparently when you try to get to the server properties page where CPUs are displayed, the UI is not equipped to handle 96 cores. Man, I wish I had a 96-core instance of SQL Server handy to try and reproduce […]
In our environment, we run the task scheduler as a cluster resource, so that scheduled tasks always run on the active node. (In ancient history, we would have scheduled tasks that weren't cluster aware – in the event of a failover, we'd have to manually disable task scheduler on the […]
I see a lot of people trash-talking the EAV (entity-attribute-value) model. If you want the full story on EAV, I recommend you read the Wikipedia entry. Basically this is the situation where instead of storing the properties of an entity in a single row, you store it as a set […]
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 the "WORKAROUND" section in […]
If you are using SQL Server 2005 or 2008 Analysis Services, and have been keeping up to date with hotfixes cumulative updates, you may have been adversely affected by a previous round (and your users might not have even noticed). Essentially you can get incorrect results from certain MDX queries, […]
Cart before the horse Last week, a fix for SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU #4 was quietly slipped into the CU4 download page. CU4 was build 10.0.2734, but you could have easily grabbed 10.0.2740 from the same download page without realizing it. Out-of-band public fixes issued with little fanfare have […]
I posted earlier that the Express Edition of Management Studio for SQL Server 2008 R2 (November CTP) is now available for download. During the first few pages in the setup wizard, I was certain that I had either downloaded the wrong version of the CTP, or else had launched the […]
For those of you that have been wanting to try out SQL Server 2008 R2, you can download the November CTP of Express here (posted yesterday) and the full version of the November CTP here. This is version 10.50.1352.12. The full version is an evaluation edition and will expire after […]
Having just returned from PASS, I needed to play catch up on a few things in a stored procedure that was being developed before I left. Being a little frazzled still, I could not for the life of me remember the name of the stored procedure where those things existed. […]
Back on September 21/22, Microsoft released its most recent cumulative updates for SQL Server 2008. For RTM, this was Cumulative Update #7 (10.00.1818), and for SP1, this was Cumulative Update #4 (10.00.2734). However, if you have requested the SP1 CU #4 hotfix download since November 4th, the download page has […]