In case you missed it, last week a new SQL Azure website went up at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlazure/ . Some of the new content includes a page with SQL Azure videos and a Community page to keep you up-to-date on what's happening. Enjoy!

I was recently talking about optimistic and pessimistic concurrency . That got me thinking about one of the most popular protocols around: HTTP. While HTTP doesn't refer to this in as many words, it does in fact have support for an optimistic concurrency system. This is based around entity tags , which...

I remember that this was a tricky thing for me to understand and remember when I first got started with databases, so I thought I might help someone out by explaining these in a simple way. Optimistic and pessimistic locking (or concurrency control) are ways of addressing a problem such as the following...

I'd like to start by making sure everyone knows that the Microsoft TechEd sessions are available online . There is some great content that is definitely worth checking out. Today, I'd like to highlight the talk on the T-SQL OVER Clause presented by Adam Machanic. Sure, you can always go to the reference...

In yesterday's post , I hinted at a method to improve memory usage in your applications. This trick can be applied anytime you have many strings in your application that have the same value but were allocated separately and thus each take up space of their own. This is something that you may find whenever...

The other day, a question popped up on the forums about whether the DataSet , by virtue of not being able to “spill to disk” intelligently like a database engine can, was inappropriate for some specific scenario. That got me thinking about how much memory the component consumes, one thing led to another...

Go find out all the goodness of the release at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx My personal favorite? Self-service business intelligence . Anything that empowers end-users is a win for me, and this one simultaneously gives IT more oversight and control of what's happening with...

If you're still developing new code using typed DataSet , you may have run into the situation where you want to read connection information at runtime, maybe from a centralized configuration file, or perhaps by simply asking the user. The place where the connection information comes into place is...

If you're working with the DataSet class and loading and saving data in XML format, you may have run into a bit of a surprise. Even when you specifically read an XSD schema into your DataSet, when you load data into it, it seems that validation doesn't work - you're still able to pass in data with extra...

As mentioned in the SQL Server Support Blog , you may find an issue installing SQL Server 2005 if you install MSXML Core Services 6.0 Service Pack 2 on Windows XP SP2, then upgrade to Windows XP SP3, then try the SQL install. Check out that post for more details, along with the KB for the problem...

I know, I know - two announcements in a row? What's happening to this blog? This is big enough to warrant it though - SP1 is now available , and if you're using SQL 2008, you definitely want to look into this. No fancy new features, you'll get "it's just better" goodness, so no reason to shy away...

If you're following the PDC announcements, new, good things are coming for developers and business... MSDN is already showing some topics to get you started. Azure Services Platform . Includes Windows Azure SDK, Live Services SDK, Microsoft .NET Services Nov 2008 CTP and SQL Services (more on that...

As announced in the Data Platform Insider , the SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack has been released. This includes SQLXML 4.0 SP1, which provides support for the new date/time data types - some of the work that my team has been doing lately, all in the spirit of XML goodness. Enjoy!

What are some good XML specifications to get acquainted with? Here are the ones I find myself referring people to the most. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition) . Close to a must-read, although XML basics are simple enough that it's often not necessary. Great to refer back to refresh...

Yes, it seems like short instructional videos are all the rage , everywhere . It's been growing for a while, of course. Still, I was happily surprised when I came across http://www.sqlservervideos.com/ today - that's a pretty specialized website! I'm looking forward to seeing what will be coming up...

Yes, it's available now , in all its yummy-licious editions. If you can't wait for your IT department to upgrade, you can always start building desktop / mobile applications with the free Express or Compact editions. Enjoy!

Yay for interoperability! If you've got systems running PHP, you can now connect them to SQL Server 2005 with the PHP driver available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=61BF87E0-D031-466B-B09A-6597C21A2E2A&displaylang=en . Enjoy!

Steve Lasker has some very good explanations on the thinking and the trade-offs behind SQL Server Express and SQL Server Compact in this post . If you haven't kept pace with the free Express and Compact editions of SQL Server, you really are missing out. Check them out!

Not too long ago, I happened to write a post mentioning how good SQL Books Online is. Well, turns out that just today I discovered that the SQL Server User Education team has its own blog. Well, one of the highly nifty things they've already posted is this Scoped Search for Books Online. Very much...

A few days ago a friend of mine asked for some books I could recommend about developing databases. This is my personal list based on personal likes – to be extra clear, this is not an endorsement from my employer. An Introduction to Database Systems, by C.J. Date. A great book that covers all sorts...

The other day I was trying to drop a database , but I was getting an error because it was in use. Given that I was the only user of the database, I was a bit puzzled... I had a number of programs running, and I wasn't sure which one might be holding on to a collection. Enter System Views , and more...

The announcement is right here . ScottGu has a recap of the articles he's posted so far here . For those who fell like they can't wait for the download, the "What's New" page is available on MSDN here . As you can see, there's a lot of developer love in this product. Some of the highlights that...

Big decimals getting you down? Vardecimal is coming to town! OK, I couldn't come up with a smarter way to begin this post. But if you have I/O bound operation in SQL Server in tables with many decimal/numeric values, you owe it to yourself to read the recently posted Reducing Database Size by Using...

After my DataView.RowFilter post , the next obvious step is of course a short post on using the DataView.Sort property. This property is simpler, as it simply takes column names, with a possible ASC or DESC modifier. You cannot use expressions directly in the Sort property, although you can use expression...

I always found the text layout on the DataColumn.Expression page a bit odd. So, in the spirit of my last post , I decided to go ahead and do something similar for it - here is a reformatted version, which will print out in columns and should fit on a two-sided letter page. Of course, any and all errors...