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 about that later, because other than a few user errors, the whole process was actually ...

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 been very rare since the Service Releases ...

This week I've been at PASS, so haven't spent a whole lot of time digging into new Connect issues.  There was one raised today where the new += syntax in SQL Server 2008 can cause a ''server error occurred'' exception:#508471 : Severe Error using += in an UPDATE statementThe only other items involve enhancements to the model database.  I ...

Light helping this week.  I am busy closing out a few projects (or at least chapters within projects) in preparation for PASS next week. ======================================== #506453 : Lock escalation no longer kicks in for INSERTs in SQL Server 2008 Adam found a nasty lock escalation bug in SQL Server 2008.  This one ...

This past week I was reviewing a few bugs surrounding the new DATE, TIME, DATETIME2 and DATETIMEOFFSET data types, introduced in SQL Server 2008.  While they are much more like first-class citizens than the CLR-based types that Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to introduce with SQL Server 2005, there are still a variety of integration problems ...

I rounded up a few interesting items this week. Does ''1/10/1900'' mean January 10th, or October 1st? This item demonstrates that Microsoft isn't all that concerned about publishing sample code that uses ambiguous or troublesome formats for date literals.  Initially the Books Online topics mentioned in the item used ''1/10/1900'' as a ...

Don't get me wrong; parallel processing is great.  And with SQL Server in particular, there are many benefits to taking advantage of the power of multiple CPUs.  However, we have all had cases where what looked like parallelism was actually hurting us (you remember turning off hyperthreading on SQL Server boxes, right?), and cases where ...

I have been involved in several discussions over the past week involving getting more diagnostic information out of the DMVs in SQL Server 2008 and beyond. Yesterday, I asked for procedure recompiles to be tracked in the new sys.dm_exec_procedure_stats DMV: http://connect.microsoft.com/SQL/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=388218 Today, ...

Inspired both directly and indirectly by fellow MVP Erland Sommarskog, whose programming wishlist I talked about the other day, I have decided to compile a list of my own wish list items, in the same spirit of, ''it's never too early.''  This list is restricted to issues involving Management Studio; I was going to cover all of ...

SQL Server 2008 is out, and I'm sure you are either learning about or already enjoying some of the new features.  And while the dev team probably doesn't wholeheartedly agree with me at this very moment, I think that it can never be too early to start thinking about the next version. As you surely know, not all of the features we have ...