Thursday, November 26th, 2009
Sometimes you’ve got to wonder why database developers do things the way the do. Take for example the sysjobhistory table in the SQL Server msdb database. Its got two awful columns namely run_date and run_time. Why are they awful you ask? Well because they are integer representations of the date ...
Posted in Development | 3 Comments »
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Recently a local SA Developer .NET community member reported an issue installing SQL Server 2008 Express as it required the as yet unreleased .NET Framework 2.0 SP2. Well yes, SQL Server 2008 does rely on the .NET Framework 2.0 SP2. According to MSDN SQL Server 2008 requires .NET Framework ...
Posted in Software | 11 Comments »
Monday, August 18th, 2008
Have you ever wanted to create a table in SQL Server with a nullable column that should be unique as well? I have often needed this and resorted to defining a new table that links to the master table. But SQL Server 2008 has the solution to this, see my ...
Posted in Development | 3 Comments »
Monday, August 11th, 2008
If you are a developer using Visual Studio 2008 and have tried to install SQL Server 2008 on top of it, you might have noticed that it doesn’t want to install. According to KB956139 Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is a required if you intend to use certain ...
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Friday, August 8th, 2008
Isaac Kunen has posted details about the new SQL Server Spatial Tools project on CodePlex containing functions that can be used when working with the new SQL Server 2008 spatial data types. The core idea is that instead of pushing up more samples showing how to ...
Posted in Development | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 8th, 2008
The other day during the Tech-Ed South Africa 2008 closing keynote it was announced that SQL Server 2008, formerly code-named Katmai, had gone gold and would release onto MSDN the same day. This is awesome news and the team has worked hard on this release. The most important ...
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Thursday, February 21st, 2008
The latest and greatest CTP of SQL Server 2008 (code-named Katmai) is now available for download and testing. This is commonly referred to as CTP6 and is the first update since CTP5 in November 2007. You can download the CTP6 bits over here. To find out what is new and ...
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Friday, February 8th, 2008
How many times have you tried to design an efficient database table design in SQL Server only to stumped with the problem of storing pure date values. Yes the currently released versions of SQL Server (up to 2005) don't support a pure date only data type. Note that SQL Server ...
Posted in Development | 1 Comment »
Monday, November 19th, 2007
Its about time that the long awaited CTP5 of SQL Server 2008 (code-named Katmai) was released. I've been seeing blog posts about MVP only builds for the last couple of days and now finally I got an e-mail notification of the November CTP that is available to download from here. ...
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Friday, November 16th, 2007
Jonathan Allen and Chad Boyd have interest blog posts on the new SQL Server 2008 compression features. Row level compression drastically reduces the meta-data needed for variable length columns. Instead of storing the length of each field in 2 bytes, it now takes a mere 3 bits. Fields themselves ...
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