I’m a huge fan of my Zune and the Zune Marketplace. I have a Zune and my two daughters do as well. I’ve owned several iPods but I just love my Zune more; especially the subscription option for music. $15/month for all the music I want is fantastic. Yes...

How many different database objects are there? I don’t know the answer either but off the top of my head I’d guess somewhere between 50 and 100, depending on how you count them. Yes, I could go count them but I’m writing this on a Saturday and between...

As an under-grad student @ Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, some 18 years ago, I first experienced the power of the technical community. I was working on a group project to build a little app for the Mac. The class was Software Engineering, CSC440, which covers...

As you probably heard, on Wednesday, November 19th, during Ted Kummert's keynote at the PASS Summit Conference, Microsoft announced future capabilities for application and multi-server management as part of the SQL Server code-name "Kilimanjaro"...

@ the SQL PASS Summit on 11/20 we announced our plans to release new capabilities for improving the collaboration between Data-Tier Developers and DBA and to address Multi-Server (or multi-instance) manageability for SQL Server. Anthony Carrabino has...

I ran into an interesting situation on my older Dell Precision 470 running Vista. For some reason a few days after I installed Vista it wouldn’t maintain network connectivity. I’d get a little yellow triangle – the warning icon – stating that I’m not...

Last Thursday morning @ the PASS Summit I participated in a panel discussion on automating DBA tasks. It was a great discussion and I was humbled by the other panel members. During the discussion I jotted down a few notes that I didn’t get to mention...

A few weeks ago I got a new laptop – a Lenovo x301. As is the case with all new machines it came loaded with a bunch of utilities and trial software. Most of the time I just nuke the machine right away and lay down a clean image of the OS. This time I...

Back in July 2007 I started using Windows Live Writer as my exclusive blog writing tool. I’m not a heavy blogger but I do need a tool that’s easy to use and still helps me write more complicated postings when needed. I still LOVE Live Writer. It’s simple...

I recently started using Windows Live Mesh to synchronize files between multiple machines. This software is so cool and so useful I just can’t say enough good things about it. In addition to sharing files with yourself you can setup folders to share files...

SQL Pass is coming up this month, November 18-21 @ the Washington State Convention Center. You can find details here . Aside from the multitude of sessions covering SQL Server there are a couple fun and interesting things that I’ll call your attention...

The Beta of SQL2K5 SP3 is now available. You can download it here .

Check out the new SQL Server site !

JC Cannon, Senior PM on the SQL Server team, presents this webcast where he explores some of the new features in SQL Server 2008 and describes how they can be used to help an organization address their compliance needs.   In the webcast JC covers...

The SQL Server Health & History tool, also known as SQLH2, has been posted on CodePlex. You can find the project home page here . SQLH2 is the precursor to the Data Collector feature added in SQL2K8.

The latest update to BOL is now available. The update is listed as August 2008 as that as the lock down for content changes. You can download it here .

I'm not super big on promoting marketing related stuff. But in this case I think there's a bunch of value for everyone. Our marketing team just launched a new site http://www.sqlserverexperience.com . Yes, it contains the normal marketing blah blah -...

The list of blogs run by the SQL Server product group keeps growing. Here I offer merely a snapshot in time of the current blogs. At the bottom there's also two links that list blogs by MS employees and SQL Server MVPs; these are not complete but offer...

There are cases where the local cache used by IntelliSense becomes stale. Refreshing the cache is easy but not necessarily obvious. There are two ways to refresh the cache: 1) Go to Edit -> IntelliSense -> Refresh Local Cache and 2) Hit Ctrl+Shift...

The SQL Server Product Group is holding a Webchat on Sept 23 from 10 am to 12 noon PST to get feedback from the community, customers, partners about their experience on SQL Server 2008 after over a month of RTM. You can find the details and participate...

Today (9/7/08) Lisa and I welcomed Elliott Edward Jones into the world. Elliott was born at 9:17 am at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, WA. He was 8 pounds 12 ounces and measured 20.5 inches long. A a result of a little fluid in his lungs he spent his...

The following write-up was originally an email I sent to Allan White (SQL Server MVP) in the context of a discussion on PowerShell and some of the PowerShell community postings questioning why SQL Server needed PowerShell support @ all given the strength...

You've installed SQL Server 2008 on a clean machine and your vb script that uses DMO doesn't work. You're asking yourself: What the heck happened? Did those goofballs over @ MS hose me? Deprecation of DMO was announced in SQL Server 2005, but SQL Server...

The Edge folks (namely Joey Snow) sat in on the SQL Server 2008 shiproom on the day we RTM'd. You can view the video here . A few interesting things to share. During a release shiproom happens every day. Each team across SQL sends at least one representative...

Two Express editions came on-line today. Express with Advanced Services and Express with Tools. You can download them from the Microsoft Download site. Here are the links: SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services (ENU): http://www.microsoft.com...