Ken Henderson's WebLog

I read a blog by Mark Russinovich the other day that disturbed me a bit. It always bothers me when someone as highly regarded as Mark completely misses the boat because it means that a lot of other people will probably miss the boat, too. People often...

In case you missed it in my last post, SQL Nexus , the SQL Server performance analysis platform built by Bart and me, has been released via CodePlex . Here's a post post where I talked about how Nexus works. And here's the link to its page on the CodePlex...

For most developers, I think the answer has to be "No," especially with the advent of managed code. Some would argue that the answer has been "No" for a long time. Tools like VB made GUI development so much easier than it ever was with MFC that many gave...

I have a number of sites I frequent and do business with, but I'm sure there are plenty of great ones that I don't know about. I'm interested to hear about the ones that you visit often. Here's my list: 1. Books, CDs, and sometimes other stuff: Amazon...

I'm starting a little series here featuring interviews with industry luminaries. I figured people might like to hear what they have to say. My first subject is Joe Celko. Q1: Tell us a little about yourself, in case somebody does not know you. A1...

Continuing the discussion from yesterday about memory-mapped files, how do they affect SQL Server? Every DLL referenced by the server (Windows libs, Net Libraries, C RTL libs, etc.), every DLL they reference, and so forth, requires virtual memory address...

With the advent of CLR stored procedures in SQL Server 2005, the custom extended procedure era will hopefully be soon behind us. Xprocs were a good idea and certainly added great functionality to earlier releases of the product, but they can also cause...

A conversation with a friend over email got me to thinking that this info might be useful to a few of you. It’s common for SQL Server application developers to want to “normalize” the query text returned in a Profiler trace such that executions of...

I was in Redmond last week on business and had a lot of fun this time around. The trip began and ended with a visit to Key Arena in downtown Seattle. Monday night it was the Van Halen concert. I’d already seen Van Halen in Kansas City back in October...

I lamented the slow death of Borland in a recent post and was roundly assailed for it by the Borland community. I speculated that perhaps the other shoe had finally dropped at Borland with the departure of Chief Scientist Danny Thorpe, the latest in a...

Lightweight pooling mode, also known as fiber mode, uses Windows fibers to service User Mode Scheduler (UMS) workers rather than threads. Windows fibers are lighter weight execution mechanisms than threads, with one thread typically hosting multiple fibers...

Early last month, I wanted to see what it would be like to blog everyday. I wanted to see how it would work into my schedule, and I wanted to see whether it would be a positive thing in the community and something that would help people. So, starting...

The simplest rule-compliant solution to the employee-mentor challenge I recently posted is to change the loop such that it iterates through the relationships at more than one speed. Making no other changes to clean up the code, something like this would...

For those who don't have this yet, it looks like Joe is blogging: http://joecelkothesqlapprentice.blogspot.com/ Joe swears this isn't him, but I'm skeptical... Among other things, the blog features lots of pictures of Joe. I'm still waiting for...

People have been emailing me quite a bit about when my SQL Server books will be updated for SQL Server 2005. Good news: they will be in print this Monday. Important details: 1. All three books have grown to over 1200 pages each. This is as much due...

Today's bug challenge is a design bug. Came across some C code like this awhile back (this is pseudo code and has all "work" elements removed from it): void AddID( char * pszObjID) { char szID[8]; //Pad the ID with spaces strcpy(szID...

I'm in the hospital once again with kidney stones. They have a saying in the emergency room here that the severity of the pain one typically experiences with kidney stones is similar to that suffered by women during childbirth. If that's true, it makes...

I mentioned in my last post here that we have a new book coming out in December that focuses on troubleshooting issues with broken SQL Servers. We've decided to release a sample chapter from the book (that has not yet been proofread) so that people can...

...and in honor of it, I'm going to be especially cryptic and give you a little word puzzle--an anagram: Catch Meek The solution I have in mind for this one pretty much sums up how I feel about today. It's a great day :-) A hint for those watching at...

Many have noted that there are some files missing from the CD accompanying my latest book, SQL Server 2005 Practical Troubleshooting . My apologies for that. We’ve just posted an update to the book’s CD at http://www.khen.com/sspt.htm . Note: you’re welcome...

I've been hearing from some folk that they consider the SQLCLR functionality in SQL Server 2005 to be a potential security hole. Some have even gone so far as to say that they plan to leave it disabled (it's not enabled by default). When pressed, many...

For those interested in such things, there's a poem over on my personal blog having to do with history, politics, and religion. Enough of my friends have been stumped by it that I thought I'd post it publicly to see how many could figure out who it was...

I've mentioned before that I had a new book coming out. It's finally available on Amazon. Again, I didn't write this one; I was just its editor. It was written by a "dream team" of developers from the SQL Server dev team and support engineers from Microsoft...

My friends in Microsoft’s Product Support Services (PSS) group (aka SQL Server Support) are speaking again this year at the PASS Community Summit . They’re doing some main conference sessions, the PSS Boot camp, and putting on the PSS Service Center again...

To follow up on the recent discussions about regular expressions in T-SQL, I thought it would make sense today to talk about why xprocs have inherent performance issues. While they provide great extensibility to SQL Server, they have intrinsic performance...