Coming as a simple sample with PBM (creating a policy with a condition that procedure names shouldn't´t start with SP_) and getting an interesting question in one of my classes, I wanted to revisit the question about the yet in some places existing naming...

Yesterday at the PASS conference I met an former colleague and he asked me about a particular challenge applying changes to the production database from Visual Studio Team System Database Edition. As he didn’t know about the new features of the deployment...

(Update: Due to security reasons the functionality retrieving data from SSIS packages has been deprecated and is no longer available in SQL Server 2008 R2) There are several scenarios where you want to extract data from different data sources and combine...

  The second release of the GDR was published today, it includes bug fixes as well as additions. See the Release Notes for more information: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/A/E/0AE1153A-8798-474A-93E6-D19299F37C8B/GDR_R2_Release_Notes.mht...

  I saw many times people having problems working with XML structures in SQL Server. It is that easy, even more with the new functionality in SQL Server 2005>. Most times people try to take the XML line with the least resistance and effort which...

For those struggling as I did for getting the complete list of all facets and its properties available, I went down the dark side of the code (Reflection) and got the methods to extract the information from the PBM framework. As a complete reference ...

For those waiting to update their CU4 fixed SQL Server 2008 server to upgrade to SP1 as they not wanted to loose the CU4 fixes, here is the most recent fix for SQL Server 2008 SP1. This version is CU1 FOR SP1. So you will have to install SP1 before applying...

I saw some confusion around the availability and difference of SP1 and CU4 on the web, therefore decided to put on a blog post for clarifying this. If you compare the contents of CU4 (RTM) and SP1 for SQL Server 2008, you will notice that some patches...

An interesting question came up in a private conversation. If you want to pick a random value from a random generated result set and want to make sure that the row is really random, is the known ORDER BY NEWID() really random enough ? The point is that...

SP_who2 has become a very handy tool for administrator, DBAs developers or all who are the All-In-One role) to get information from the processes table and get the appropriate information by just issuing this command form the command line. Easy if you...

If you use database mirroring, the essence is that you use an additional connection property which is called “Failover partner” to make the client aware that it can try to connect to another server. If the principal went down or you lost connection to...