John Gallardo's Weblog

This one is making the rounds here at work. In case you don't recognize the name, he is the guy who made the Lord of the Rings movies. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/news/2005/1004-x05showcase.htm Peter Moore, corporate vice president of Worldwide Marketing...

The answer, is quite simply "No." Someone shot a post from Google Groups through my inbox this morning where some people were having problems with session timeouts (they were seeing rsExecutionNotFound exceptions). Their "solution" was to edit the...

The Windows Live folks just released Windows Live Writer . It's a tool which runs on your desktop and lets you publish blog entries to a bunch of different weblog formats. This is a test post on my MSDN blog. So far I think it is pretty cool. It autodetected...

rsReportNotReady is only supposed to be thrown when a report is configured to run from an execution snapshot, and the execution snapshot has not yet been created. It is a pretty rare occurrence and the whole error code is really meant to cover the small...

Steve Jones recently interviewed me for a regular column he has on sqlservercentral.com . Check it out! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sjones/sqlserverspotlightonjohngallardo.asp

The Performance Optimizations for XML Data Type in SQL Server 2005 whitepaper written by Shankar gives some pretty good advice for writing your XQuery statements so that they take advantage of an available XML Index. However, oftentimes you will have...

http://blogs.msdn.com/alanga/archive/2006/01/25/517675.aspx Alan is a good friend of mine that works on Expression Interactive Designer. They have a CTP that was just released (downloading it now). Hi Alan!

Couple of changes since we shipped SQL Server 2005. I have moved from the Relational Engine team over to Reporting Services. Its interesting to see the product from a completely different end. At any rate, if you are actually reading this thing then you...

Windows Authentication is good stuff, and rightly so many people are using it in their Reporting Services deployments. Lately, there has been quite a rash of questions that people have regarding the inability to connect to their data sources when using...

Jinghao (my manager here in the SQL Server Engine team) has started up a blog about SQL Server . His blog is targetting Chinese speakers. However, if you are like me and don't read Chinese you can get the fish to translate it for you .

A little while ago I threw out this quiz regarding XML and SQL Server 2005's full text search support. As I stated in the quiz, there is a subtle difference between what you can get with contains() and the fulltext support. Specifically, the difference...

http://microsoftgadgets.com/default.aspx The "gadgets" folks have updated their blog to include some gadgets that you can add to start.com . I'm trying out the "Flickr" gadget as well as the "to-do" list gadget. Are you using start.com yet?

XML Schema has an interesting feature where you can define a value as being "fixed" . The meaning here is basically that an attribute or element has to have a particular value, and if it is not there in the instance, then that value is implied. However...

Ian Jose, an Architect here in SQL Engine working on the Query Optimizer, has just started a blog . Lots of good tips and practical advice for getting the most out of SQL Server's query optimizer.

http://blogs.msdn.com/weix/archive/2005/09/13/464907.aspx Wei mentions a couple of optimizations that can be made for TEMPDB heavy applications. Since XML datatype uses TEMPDB heavily for LOB storage, I recommend checking this out and instrumenting...

Using SQL Server's fulltext engine is a great way to optimize your XQuery statements which use XQuery's contains function in a predicate . However, a bit of care has to be taken, because sometimes you might get results which you don't quite expect. ...

I'm helping to proctor a lab session on the new XML features in SQL Server 2005 on Tuesday from 12:00-4:00. This is my first time at one of these events on the "staff" side. I went to PDC when a lot of the CLR stuff was gearing up a few years ago when...

Major Nelson has the scoop over at http://www.majornelson.com/2005/08/17/xbox-360-details-and-prices/ . The "core" package (XBox 360, wired controller, and standard TV connection) will run $299. If you want all the sweet goodies (20GB HDD, wireless...

Testing Testing... Ok I guess we are on. My name is John Gallardo (clever that, it matches the title). As of today I have been working at Microsoft for just over 2 years as an SDET (Software Design Engineer in Test) in the SQL Server Engine team. Most...

This might be long, so I am going to cut to the chase right now. If you are using predicates which involve non-string types in your XQuery statements, you want to use typed data. There, I said it. Now lets try to figure out why. The issue basically...

Denis talks about static typing again over in his blog. Today he is focusing on path expressions which evaluate to singletons. I recommend you check the entry on his site for the details. The only thing that I wanted to add is that usually it is better...

http://blogs.msdn.com/galexy/ Galex has started blogging as well. He is another SDET here in the SQL Server engine team working on the XML data type.

Link Strangely, one of the things I am looking forward to most for the XBox 360 is the inclusion of a real music visualizer. Frankly, since switching off WinAmp more than a few years ago I have been missing decent visualizations. The ones available...

Last week I threw out this simple little quiz . Here is the answer. The first query will return 1 or 0 rows, depending on what the default collation in your database is. On my machine, which uses the default out-of-the-box collation "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS...

Check out Mike's entry regarding namespaces in XQuery. I wanted to illustrate one more point regarding the consequences when namespace prefix bindings affect both query and construction. It is about the default element namespace. The real problem hits...