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 that; sadly, I'll have to take his word for it for now.  I've actually done some work on some 48-core servers recently, but they are Hyper-V hosts and the SQL Server instances within the guest VMs obviously don't have 48 CPUs.  🙂

#511238 : Error Object reference not set to an instance of an object. (SqlManagerUI) …

Give BULK INSERT a partner in crime

A duplicate entry yesterday reminded me of this long-standing request to give BULK INSERT a partner – BULK EXPORT or BULK SELECT.  Currently there is no way to extract data to a file using T-SQL alone, we must resort to SSIS, SQLCMD, PowerShell, etc.  I don't think Microsoft is too enthusiastic about providing a solution here; after all, it took them nearly a year to acknowledge that the request is useful.  Still, I am hopeful.

#224026 : SQL Engine – BULK EXPORT command

Let me know how much a database has changed

Ola has another good one about determining the percentage of a database that has changed since the last backup.  The latest version of LiteSpeed has SmartDiff technology that makes decisions about whether it makes more sense to perform a full backup or a differential, and we can do something similar the hard way using DBCC PAGE, but a DMV would be much easier.

#511305 : DMV to check the percentage of a database that has changed since the last full backup

Enhance windowing functions the way Itzik would have implemented them

And finally, yesterday Michael Coles reminded us about Itzik Ben-Gan's many requests to enhance the windowing functions in T-SQL.  Since it looks like SQL Server 2008 R2 is not going to have any enhancements in this area, maybe now is the time to start pushing for them in SQL11.  Rather than repeat the Connect items here I'll just point you to Michael's blog post.