A quick post. It has just been announced, SQL Server 2008 R2 will be released in May. Customers with Software Assurance can upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2 and take advantage of the new features without incurring additional licensing costs. I am glad I have Software Assurance so hopefully I can roll this out sometimes this year More about this announcement here: http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2010/01/19/sql-server-2008-r2-gets-an-official-date.aspx
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Marlon Ribunal tagged me from his post going around in reference to personal life-direction-changing-events. Everyone has taken to the top 3 events that most reflect how you have reached the level in your life so far and I will follow that pattern. I thought about this a lot last night and came up with my 3 events that bring themselves to the front of how I managed to get where I am today.
The enhancements to the Activity Monitor were an extremely useful addition to SQL Server 2008. We can gather a moving view of statistics and the health of the instances we connect to. In the real world however, the activity monitor loses value when you need to connect to dozens of SQL Servers in order to obtain that moving feel of each server you manage. There is also the nuisance of being required to open a separate Activity Monitor instance for each server we connect to from SSMS.
Every now and then someone will ask how to return a list of all the identity values in a table that have been skipped. You will probably have a table with an identity column, the ‘problem’ with identity columns is that if an insert is rolled back or fails in any way then the identity value is not reused…you end up with gaps. Identifying gaps is pretty easy to do if you have a table of numbers in your database.
Yes the title is ironic. But still I mean it. I have been noticing some spammers on our forum for a while now. Nothing too serious and it is mainly link spamming. Some try to hide the links by making them white text. Some make a perfectly good reply to a post and then come back the next day to add the links. And some enter them as their signature and then make a not so smart post.
If you download ASP.NET MVC from Microsoft, install it and create a MVC website you might run into a couple of gotchas in regards to the database. First of all ASP.NET MVC use SQL Server Express by default in the connection string. So if you were to run your ASP.NET MVC website, then clicking on login you would get this error: _A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server.
Never really had much need for XML in SQL Server, but I’d played around with it a bit in the past. I do my best to learn the bare minimum about things like this, just in case. Just in case happened a little while ago. We got a request to add customer-defined data fields to our application, with only a week of development time before our next release. And of course, this functionality *HAD* to go into said release.
Earlier today I was reading an article by Peter Cripps entitled “Attributes of an IT Architect”. Several of his statements won my instant agreement, but one or two left me deep in thought, on the cusp of disagreement. This being a challenging state to be in while halfway into my first cup of coffee, I immediately started a second cup to fuel the train of thought and, ultimately, this post.
Yesterday we used the sys.dm_os_performance_counters dynamic management view in the post Find Out What Percent Of The Log Is Being Used For Each Database In SQL Server 2005 and 2008 to find out the log space used, today we will use this dynamic management view to find out if we are using any deprecated features. So you have upgraded your old server to SQL Server 2008 and you wonder if you have any deprecated features in your code.
I had the need to create a setup that changed my app.config file. In actual fact I wanted to create several setup files which I could then send to the user so that it would install the same program but with a small difference in the app.config file. And I also did not want any user input for this else I could have easily done it with just one setupproject. I don’t trust users to enter the correct value.