Today I've been working on the SSMS chapter for SQL Server 2008 Bible. The list of new features for SSMS is rather impressive. Here’s a copy/paste from the book… SQL Server 2008’s Management Studio is an evolution of the SQL Server 2005’s Management Studio, which was a merger of the old Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer. For SQL Server ...

Buck Woody, Microsoft SQL Server Program Manager, recently posted a list of enhancements in the works for SQL Server 2008 RTM in the SQL Server MVP newsgroup. The usual suspects were included in the list: Policy-Based Management (formerly DMF), Resource Governor, Multi-Server Query, PowerShell, and IntelliSense - but there are also some ...

Ok, so I was looking around for a blurb about plan guides for my anti ad hoc SQL section of my book (ok, maybe not completely anti- but that isn't the point,) when I found this blog: http://geekswithblogs.net/Sreeblog/articles/117576.aspx that basically just lists some new features in 2008.  One that I hadn't seen I feel the need to ...

Katmai Management Studio has the Way Cool ability to send T-SQL to multiple servers with a single F5 Execute. Watch the Screencast (4:00).

The SQL team seems to have been quite busy recently, commenting on and closing out many bugs and suggestions that have been raised, I suppose as they close out work on the SQL Server 2008 codebase. Some (like Buck Woody and Bill Ramos, among others) have been very good about commenting that while they can't address the issue(s) for SQL Server ...

In playing with the latest CTP for SQL Server 2008, I stumbled across some new context menu items for a server group node in Registered Servers.  You can now right-click a group node and choose options such as ''New Query'' or ''Object Explorer.''  When I first saw the items in the list, I thought it was some kind of bug, because how can ...

[Updates below in BOLD.]On loading SSMS for the first time, I noticed a few things.  First of all, the row(s) affected message is now prefixed with information on the instance and login relevant to the query execution: As illustrated in the graphic, this information is already available in the status bar.  Why are they spoon-feeding ...

After attending a few sessions at PASS, based on much newer builds of SQL Server 2008, I have some additional information to complement what I have published in my slides (since I am not scheduled to present the talk further, I am not going to go back and re-vamp the slides every time I find out a new piece of information). One important ...

Yes, you were already aware of 40 or 50 reasons not to use Open Table.  I have one more.  Say you are creating a table with a composite key that includes a binary column.  An example I came across recently was a table that captures additional data not covered by CDC (e.g. username).  So, I created this table: CREATE TABLE ...