Paul Flessner is one of my favorite VPs. Here is a recent high level talk that Paul and others gave on SQL Server 2005 http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/shared/asp/view.asp?url=/seminar/en/20050906_isvconnect/manifest.xml&rate=2. The talk is for ISVs that sell database based applications but it is nice high level look at SQL Server 2005 and the thinking behind its development....

In the comments to my intellisense blog entry people asked a reasonable question: why not just ship some of the imperfect T-SQL intellisense Microsoft developers have built internally and thus help our customers be more productive. I thought an explanation might give you some interesting insights into how Microsoft works and what it takes to build software for a global mass-market....

Sqlcmd is the SQL Server 2005 replacement for osql which in turn is being deprecated in SQL Server 2005. An irritating aspect of osql is that it lacks basic macro facilities. A macro processor like M4 could be used to preprocess the script but that required deploying M4. So I was excited when I learnt that sqlcmd had macro like features built-in....