This week, after seeing a lot of the DMV enhancements made in SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1, I thought I would take a look at some dynamic management view/function requests. Page split personality Michael Zilberstein blogged on Monday about how Extended Events and the transaction log differ in the way they report page split information, and that it ...

At SQL Bits I presented my ''What's New in Denali?'' deck in two different sessions - once on Friday to about 120 people, and once on Saturday to about 80 people. You can download the deck and samples below.  

I will be delivering my Deep Dives 2 draft on time.  

Today I was in Chicago for SQL Saturday #67 to present my ''What's New in SQL Server Denali'' deck. You can download the deck and samples below. I mentioned during the talk that THROW is another command added to the list that require the previous statement to be terminated with a semi-colon. Here is the blog post I referenced that talked more ...

Recently I was asked by John Sterrett (blog | twitter) to present to his SQL Server user group (WVPASS) in Wheeling, West Virginia. Well, today is the day, and I will be presenting, ''What's new in SQL Server Denali'' at tonight's meeting, sponsored by SQL Sentry. The slide deck is attached below; the samples are available here. If you attended ...

At the end of my Denali presentation at SQL Saturday #65 in Vancouver, a member of the audience asked, ''What makes a columnstore index different from a regular nonclustered index?'' At the end of a busy day, I was at a loss for an answer, and I'll explain why. First, I'll briefly explain the basic, core, high-level functionality of a columnstore ...

Today I presented my ''What's New in SQL Server 'Denali''' deck to about 40 attendees at SQL Saturday #65 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Attached below (and here) are the slightly updated slides and samples.

Attached are the slide decks and demos from my two presentations at SQL Saturday #60 in Cleveland:What's New in SQL Server ''Denali''T-SQL : Bad Habits to Kick 

In a previous post about changed system objects in Denali, I talked about the changes to memory-related DMVs due to underlying changes in the memory manager.  The SQLOS team has posted a great introduction to these changes, and they plan to post more details in future posts.  In the meantime, and due to a question yesterday from Tom ...

In my previous job, we had several cases where schema changes or incorrect developer assumptions in the middle tier or application logic would lead to type mismatches.  We would have a stored procedure that returns a BIT column, but then change the procedure to have something like CASE WHEN <condition> THEN 1 ELSE 0 END.  In this ...