August 2008 - Posts

• LINQ to SQL and the procedure cache of SQL Server

  I just received a mail from Adam Machanic that pointed me to this bug (I would call it a performance issue) about the construction of SQL statements generated by the LINQ to SQL engine. The issue: every string passed as a constant in the query will be Read More... Posted Thursday, August 28, 2008 3:14 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 1 Comments

• When heap tables don't recover deleted pages

  Today I solved an issue for a customer that was a little bit unexpected, at least for me. The scenario: a table with a few records is periodically updated: a few records are inserted (with a bulk insert) and a few records are deleted (the older ones). Read More... Posted Wednesday, August 27, 2008 4:25 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 6 Comments

• Get SQL Server allocation info inside SSMS

  I just installed the Allocation Information add-in for SQL Server Management Studio . It's very cool having this tool integrated into SSMS. It is a free add-in published on CodePlex. Take a look, it does worth the download in my opinion. Share this post: Read More... Posted Monday, August 18, 2008 2:15 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 5 Comments

• IQueryable under the cover

  In the Programming Microsoft LINQ book we dedicated two whole chapters (76 pages) about the writing of a IQueryable LINQ provider: one is about expression trees and the other covers the several ways to extend LINQ, including the writing of an IQueryable Read More... Posted Sunday, August 17, 2008 12:02 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 2 Comments

• The use of FOR XML PATH for string concatenation

  I've just read this interesting article from Anith Sen that lists many different ways to concatenate several row values into a single column (i.e. one row for each category with a field containing a comma separated list of products for that category). Read More... Posted Wednesday, August 13, 2008 12:09 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 4 Comments

• Important LINQ Changes in .NET 3.5 SP1

  Dinesh Kulkarni wrote an important post about changes in LINQ introduced by .NET 3.5 SP1 that has been released yesterday. One of the interesting changes is in the Cast<T> operator and its behavior is better described in this post by Ed Maurer. Read More... Posted Tuesday, August 12, 2008 10:50 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• Mark Russinovich at Virtualization Congress (London)

  A few months ago I talked about SQL Server Virtualization . For me, taking a look at virtualization improvements is very important, because I still think that not every database can be virtualized, but many of them probably yes! And the trend is that Read More... Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 5:28 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments