''My name is Andy Leonard. I tweet.'' ''Hi Andy, we love you.'' It's true, I am a bona fide Twitter-holic. If you use the service you may have noticed disruptions lately. Frank La Vigne (recently married - congratulations Frank!) blogged about it. The Twitter developers are blogging about it. And they have raised the ire of Mr. Scoble, who ...

Bob Ward posted a blog entry today where he explains the process of getting a cumulative update for SQL Server 2005 without having to call Microsoft's support team (they are called CSS now but you may remember them as PSS).  This is a great evolution in the process, which used to be very difficult (you had to open a support case and be deemed ...

Some notes about the SQL Server Service Pack Installation Engine. I like it - a lot. The new engine goes to great lengths to prevent my having to bounce a physical server to apply a service pack. No matter how you slice it, it takes less time to stop and restart a service than restart the server. You will reach a point in the installation where ...

Buck Woody has a great series going on SQL Server ManagementStudio Standard Reports. The SQL Server team did a great job developing these insightful and intuitive reports. I often show them to customers and during presentations and the response is always positive. :{> Andy

Service pack 2 for SQL Server 2005 is already 11 months old. And there is still no sign of service pack 3 on the horizon. Why is that? Has Microsoft managed to release a perfect, completely bug-free product? No, of course not – with the size and complexity of a product such as SQL Server is, that will simply never happen.   There have, in ...

Ken Henderson blogs about some cool new utilities / tools for SQL Server: SQL Nexus, SQLDiag, and Retrace!  :{> Andy

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP4 mainstream support ends 8 April 2008 and - as of the datetime of this post - they are sticking with that date. That's 4 months and 3 days from today. There are still a lot of SQL Server 2000 instances out there... :{> Andy