Every year, PowerShell increases its stranglehold on the Windows Server system and the applications that run upon it – with good reason too. Its consistent mechanisms for interaction between its scripting interface and the underlying systems make it easy for people to feel comfortable, and there is a discoverability that has been lacking in many ...

If you haven’t been caught by a client (or even yourself) installing SQL 2008 R2 Evaluation Edition and then letting it expire, you might not realise the pain that this causes. To say it’s frustrating is a serious understatement. Fellow SQL MVP and SQLBlog blogger Aaron Bertrand (@aaronbertrand) has an excellent post on the matter, which he put ...

SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability is the ability to seek for items in an index according to a particular set of criteria. If you ...

With PowerShell becoming the scripting language of choice for many people, I’ve occasionally wondered about using it to analyse execution plans. After all, an execution plan is just XML, and PowerShell is just one tool which will very easily handle xml. The thing is – there’s no Get-SqlPlan cmdlet available, which has frustrated me in the past. ...

Regular readers of my blog (at sqlblog.com – please let me know if you’re reading this elsewhere) may be aware that I’ve been doing more and more with spatial data recently. With the now-available SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services including maps, it’s a topic that interests many people. Interestingly though, although many people have plenty ...