Very early this morning, Microsoft released two new cumulative updates for the SQL Server 2008 platform. Cumulative Update #7 for SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 If SELECT @@VERSION is between 10.00.4000 and 10.00.4322 KB article is KB #2617148 There are 18 fixes posted to the KB article The new […]
Books Online articles referencing built-in CLR functions (such as FORMAT()) have a remark similar to the following: "FORMAT relies on the presence of .the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR)." A lot of people seem to interpret this as meaning: "You must enable the sp_configure option 'CLR enabled' in order […]
Last week when RC0 was released, the updated installer for "Juneau" (SQL Server Data Tools) was not available. Depending on how you tried to get it, you either ended up on a blank search page, or a page offering the CTP3 bits. Important note: the CTP3 Juneau bits are not […]
If you're going to install Distributed Replay Controller I've posted about this on twitter a few times, but I thought I should put it down somewhere permanent as well. When you install RC0, and have selected the Distributed Replay Controller, you should be very careful about choosing the "Add Current […]
As with every new major milestone, one of the first things I do is check out what has changed under the covers. Since RC0 was released yesterday, I've been poking around at some of the DMV and other system changes. Here is what I have noticed: New objects in RC0 […]
Today on the twitter hash tag #sqlhelp, @leenux_tux asked: How can I figure out the percentage of fields that don't have data ? After further clarification, it turns out he is after what proportion of columns are NULL. Some folks suggested using a data profiling task in SSIS. There may […]
This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Brad Schulz (blog) and the topic is one that should attract a lot of submissions: Procedures and Functions. Last week, I talked about the case against INFORMATION_SCHEMA views – I provided several examples where I feel the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views fall short of […]
In SQL Server 2000, INFORMATION_SCHEMA was the way I derived all of my metadata information – table names, procedure names, column names and data types, relationships… the list goes on and on. I used the system tables like sysindexes from time to time, but I tried to stay away from […]