Imagine that you're moving thousands or millions of rows between two tables. Maybe it's between a staging table and a data warehouse in an ETL process. Maybe you're manipulating some data via a temp table as you're preparing lookup data for your OLTP system. Maybe you're preparing data for an end user. It doesn't really matter what your use case, ...

I've filed a few Connect items recently that I think are important. In #752210, I complain that the documentation for DDL triggers suggests that they can prevent certain DDL from being run, which is not the case at all.      ...

Hide databases from users who shouldn't be able to see them This is a long-standing request from Erland Sommarskog which I've highlighted in previous digests. But the underlying problem keeps coming up in multiple venues, so I thought it would be good to call attention to the item one more time. Some will argue that the contained database feature ...

Make SSMS start faster A couple of years ago, I blogged about some ways to make Management Studio start faster. With the latest builds of SQL Server 2012, it seems to be slower than ever, at least when starting SSMS for the first time after a reboot or install. So I've asked for them to do something in the background on Windows start-up ...

In some circles I'm known as ''the Connect guy'' because I've filed a heck of a lot of suggestions and bugs that I've envisioned or encountered, and I'm often willing to file an issue on someone else's behalf. In other circles, for very much the same reasons, I'm probably known as ''that annoying Connect guy.'' On and off over the past few years, ...

Sorry I have fallen off the Connect Digest wagon for the past few weeks; been a little swamped since returning from SQLCruise Alaska. Not sure I'll be able to assemble a digest every week, but I'll certainly try to keep a steady pace. This week I wanted to highlight a few suggestions around indexed views. With the coming of SQL Server code-named ...

Next week I'll be up in Alaska for SQL Cruise, so I'll be skipping at least one digest. This week I gathered a few engine-related issues, two involving what the engine does while an index is being created. The most important one, though, at least IMHO, is the first one listed, involving a hashing algorithm fix that is in SQL Server 2008 R2 - but ...

I wanted to change it up a little this week. In every digest, I've pointed out a set of Connect items that I believe deserve more attention. What I fail to point out every week is the number of Connect items that actually get resolved with a fix. These are even less visible than the active requests, but I think they deserve some attention as well. ...

This week I decided to focus on a few suggestions revolving around automation and making certain tasks easier to script or deploy. The first one that came to mind was a recent request from Nicholas Cain (blog | twitter), asking for a SCHEMA_ONLY backup option - to make moving a database *without* the data a much easier process: #660256 : Add ...

This week I decided to focus on some of the long-outstanding issues with IntelliSense in Management Studio. While I know many of you are using 3rd party tools like RedGate's SQL Prompt, not everybody has that luxury - in my case, I can't justify a license for every single server I touch, since I can't connect to every environment using SSMS ...