Most people I’ve spoken to have at least heard of the Express edition. The next question I ask is where they’re running it: development or production? The answer is usually both . But when I drill into the production use it turns out that most of the...

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Do you work with someone who is just terrific but haven’t told them? Do you look at them as somewhat of an informal mentor? Working at a large company, like Microsoft, it’s a fact of life that people come and go. In large companies there are so many interesting...

I follow the blog and/or Twitter of many of the SQL Server MVPs and to be blunt this is a truly amazing group of professionals. Their passion for SQL Server is undeniable. Their desire to expand their already deep knowledge of the product is unsurpassed...

Today we finished planning for our next sprint. Man, I can’t stress enough what an awesome experience it is. Being part of a team is good. Being part of a team that rocks is nothing short of exhilarating. Yesterday we split the day between a sprint review...

I've been having an interesting open dialog with Steve Jones (SQL Server Central) on the issue of disclosing security vulnerabilities. You can read the thread here: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=263&messageid=267111...

Did you know that Management Studio (SSMS) has a rich set of built-in reports? Furthermore, did you know you can author your own reports that will run inside SSMS? Buck Woody is starting a blog series on the reports in SSMS. These reports are designed...

@ Tech Ed this year I opened my session talking about how cars have evolved. The analogy is as we don't tinker with our cars anymore the same is going to have to managing data environments - and DMF is part of the initial wave that'll make this happen...

Phil Factor recently wrote an editorial about Project Houston . I agree with his meta point that database design tools have not evolved as quickly as we’d like but I disagree with his characterization that Project Houston is a failure because it doesn...

I just finished reading this article on NoSQL security. It raised a couple of concerns: 1. Systems require security. Hard stop. no if’s and’s or but’s about it. Designing security from the start is a hard task. At Microsoft there are several practices...

Within SQL Server there are a number of different types of constraints: CHECK DEFAULT FOREIGN KEY PRIMARY KEY UNIQUE The reference for CREATE TABLE can be found here . Now what’s interesting about constraints is when creating a constraint the name is...

I saw this this morning and found it very interesting: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/proof_that_empl.html The main article is interesting but what's really interesting are the comments. I didn't read through all of them, but enough...

Check out the new SQL Server site !

Well folks it’s official we’re going to release SQL Server 2008 R2! The release date is set for May 2010. You can get a few more details here .

Two things I’ve always admired about Microsoft products are product integration and development tools. Microsoft isn’t a company to stand still and with that a new set of database development tools has been released as a CTP. Visual Studio Team Edition...

@ TechEd 2007 I presented an overview session on new manageability features in SQL Server 2008. SQL Server Central's Steve Jones blogged about the session. Steve provides a pretty accurate account of the session (thanks Steve). This is mostly a straight...

Yes, you read the title correctly, SQL Server 2008. Today @ TechEd we announced the official name for the next release of SQL Server. Previously it was referred to under the codename Katmai, no longer. Some have asked why we announced the name so far...

This isn’t related to SQL Server, but it’s really cool – IMHO. Out on www.live.com they removed the “>>” that used to launch the link in a new browser window (which I really like) and replaced it with a [more] “link”. I was totally skeptical of...

How many databases in the world do you think are storing your personal information? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? I have no clue what the answer is but my guess is it’s closer to thousands than tens. Why is this an interesting question? In my line of work...

This article on naming conventions - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/bknight/2687.asp - provides excellent best practice for naming database objects. Do you (or your company) have a set of naming standards that you follow? If so, I'd love it...

I was a fan of the show the Crocodile Hunter and more so of Steve Irwin – if you can really separate the two. I've long admired Steve for following his passion for conservationism and not letting life get in the way. I suppose it's somewhat poetic to...

If you use Maintenance Plans and have upgraded or plan to update to SQL2K5 SP2 you need to read this blog post .

I recently installed Office 2007 Beta 2. It has a cool feature to post to blogs directly from within Word. I decided to give it a shot. Setting the blog registration was straight forward – there was a little user error on my part to get it to work but...

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...

There is a bug in the SQL Server 2008 June CTP that causes Declarative Management to be inoperable. The fix is very simple. Launch a command line and run the following command: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\sn.exe -Vr Microsoft...