Ken Henderson's WebLog

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...

The world's first production deployment of SQL Server 2000 on a 64-way, 64-bit machine was a success. I've had a fantastic time here in Seoul -- both working and after-hours. The food has been great, the people wonderful, and the weather Spring-like....

I'm currently in Seoul, South Korea assisting with the first 64-way, 64-bit deployment of SQL Server in the world. The 14 and 1/2 hour flight has left me extremely jet-lagged -- I didn't sleep a wink on the flight. I got here last evening, went to bed...

Most knowledgable SQL Server DBAs know you shouldn't compress a database's data and log files, but I'll wager that few know the details behind why that's such a bad idea. The general reply might be "Performance" -- and that's correct -- but the assumption...

Came across this in some code recently. The code excerpt below is part of a larger cmd line application that can be run as both a console app and a service. One of the things it can do is start other processes, optionally trapping their output in a file...

<shameless_promotion> Addison-Wesley has asked me to mention that B&N is doing a big promotion of my SQL Server books right now. I believe the figure they cited was a 40% discount, IIRC. Check with B&N for the details. So, if you're interested...

I didn't really finish the discussion of what I began in this blog , so I'll do so today. Why do I think .NET is the best thing to happen to software since OOP? Several reasons: 1. Based on what the market has said, software for the PC and for Windows...

For those who don't already know about it, I blog about non-technical things on MSN Spaces at http://spaces.msn.com/members/khen1234 . I'm reserving my MSDN blogs for technical topics, so if you want to read some more of my random ramblings, check out...

Service Pack 4 for SQL Server 2000, due out any day now, has a number of new features oriented toward making the product easier to support. One of these is the new detection and reporting of stalled or stuck I/O operations. A stalled I/O is an I/O operation...

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...

I get asked pretty often which of these two languages I prefer. I prefer C#. But which one should you choose? That depends. * If you have lots of legacy VB code, VB.NET may be a better choice. VB.NET is a full-featured language and rivals C# in features...

From time-to-time, I'm going to post a code snippet with a subtle bug in it for people interested in tracking down such things. Here's the first one (C/C++): TCHAR g_szFoo[10]; void CopyArg(TCHAR * pszArg) { _tcsncpy(g_szFoo, pszArg, (sizeof...

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...

As the creator of a few SQL Server-specific tools myself (Sequin, DataPipe, etc.), I have some fairly strong opinions on what type of functionality the tools that come in the white box with SQL Server should have, particularly the GUI apps. At a high...

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...

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...