In case you missed Kalen's post, we're excited to announce that she will be joining us here on the East Coast in October to deliver her SQL Server 2005/2008 Internals and Query Tuning seminar. This is, to my knowledge, the most advanced public SQL Server course to be offered in the Boston area in the last 5 years, and this is the first time that ...

The Enterprise Policy Management Framework version 3.0, a new version of the framework to support policy automated policy evaluation for SQL Server 2000 and 2005, has been posted to codeplex. For those who are not familiar with the tool, the Enterprise Policy Management Framework is a reporting solution on the state of the SQL Server enterprise ...

After much feedback from customers (and some loud feedback from MVPs, led primarily by Maciej Pilecki), Microsoft's Bob Ward just announced at the European PASS Conference that they are going to allow the 'lock pages in memory' privilege for all the lowly peons running Standard Edition.  Currently this has only been allowed on Enterprise ...

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 ...

This the second time in a row I will not able to attend to SQLBits - but don't lose this event if you can go to Manchester on March 28th, 2009. The conference is free, but registration is required. A training day (with a reasonable fee) is also scheduled the day before. I hope to attend the next one... The reason I cannot go is mainly because a ...

“I sense you skipped SQL Server 2005 in you...  Skipping SQL Server 2005 leads to a bigger learning curve...  A bigger learning curve leads to not knowing the product as well...Not knowing the product as well leads to suffering..Running in compatibility mode 8.0 is the path to the darkside.. SQL Server 2008 (mode 10.0) is the force...May ...

A frequently asked question that surfaced again today is, ''how do I see when my data has been accessed last?''  SQL Server does not track this information for you.  SELECT triggers still do not exist.  Third party tools are expensive and can incur unexpected overhead.  And people continue to be reluctant or unable to constrain ...

A year in review, The 21 + 1 best blog posts on SQLBlog Best posts according to me, it might have been the content or it might have been the comments. Either way here are the 21 + 1 posts I enjoyed the most. But wait the year is not over yet. Doesn't matter no one will write anything good till next year anyway (prove me wrong and I WILL update ...

You need to return NULL only if the value of your data is a certain value. How do you do this? There are three different ways. NULLIFDECLARE @1 char(1)SELECT @1 ='D' SELECT NULLIF(@1,'D')REPLACEThis should not really be used, I just added it here to demonstrate that you can in fact use it.DECLARE @1 char(1)SELECT @1 ='D' SELECT ...

Drag And Drop Column Names In Query Analyzer you can save a lot of time by using this trick instead of typing all the column names of a table Hit F8, this will open Object Browser Navigate to DatabaseName/TableName/Columns Click on the column folder and drag the column folder into the Code Window Upon release you will see that all the column names ...