I am giving 3 presentations at SQL PASS 2007 in Denver: Wednesday, September 19th, 9:45am to 11am, room 709: DBA-317-M The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Beyond Relational (co-presenting with Kevin Farlee) Main focus will be the new features...

At today's TechEd 2007 in Orlando , we have annouced SQL Server 2008's, formerly known as Katmai, first community tech preview (CTP). Unlike SQL Server 2005, where we took over 5 years, SQL Server 2008 will be delivered in less than 3! See here for the...

Now that we have shipped SQL Server 2005 , I would really like to hear from you what you want us to do regarding XML support in SQL Server 2005. Feel free to either contact me directly or leave your wish in the comment section.

Tomorrow I will be on my way to Europe for the SQL Server Launch Events in Zurich and Lausanne ( Switzerland ) and Athens (Greece) . In Switzerland I will be presenting a specially made presentation on "What's new in SQL Server 2005" that will be more...

Now that we have shipped SQL Server 2005, I am happy to see that people are interested in using it. Today, I ask you the following riddle: What does SQL Server 2005, MySpace.com and Quiznos have in common? Well, here is the answer: Here is a...

The Windows Server System team is doing a Learning and Help survey and need more SQL Server specific feedback. If you live outside of the United States or Canada, we want to know more about your experience with SQL Server! How did you initially...

Today is the big launch. Steve B. is giving the launch keynote in San Francisco. I am currently sitting in a meeting room at a competitor's place where I am at for a W3C XQuery meeting watching the live webcast during our lunch break :-). I already provided...

Finally, after 6 years of hard work, the W3C has released the Candidate Recommendation specs for XQuery 1.0, XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0. Does this mean that the recommendations are done? No, not yet. But it means that we reached an important milestone. Now...

The PDC 2005 videos are now online (via http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2005/10/24/484434.aspx ). Oleg has distilled the XML and language specific presentations. And finally, from that list, here is the pointer to my presentation: DAT405...

We have RTM'ed today! Today, we have released SQL Server 2005 and VisualStudio 2005 and the .Net Framework 2.0 to manufacturing. This means the code is baked, done, shipped,... :-). It will be downloadable from MSDN within the day and available through...

It is my pleasure to introduce you all to Jinghao's weblog . He is our test lead and so far seems to cover the SQL Server 2005 XML support in Chinese :-). Please go and take a look and say 你好 .

The last year has been tough on many. Many people have been and are getting killed in wars and conflicts ( Iraq , Sudan/Dafour ), got devastated by Tsunamis , starve due to famines and loose their lively-hood and sometimes even lives due to Hurricanes...

While we are less than a month away from the official launch week of SQL Server 2005 , I am still providing you with the promissed change list for the XML area in SQL Server 2005's September CTP . And please accept my apology for the delay. Please...

In SQL Server 2005 versions up to the June CTP, the XML parser on the server-side defaulted to UTF-16 for documents without a leading byte-order mark and without an explicit encoding in the XML declaration. Since this was incompatible with the XML standard...

Since we got "upgraded" from .Text to Community server, we are not getting good referrer log information anymore. However, since I added some additional traffic tracking I can see a bit better again, what people are looking for(still not as good as .Text...

As many others in the SQL Server community, I have travelled to Grapevine, Texas to attend and present at this year's SQLPASS 2005 (site seems down while I write this). Since some people were unable to attend or had to leave early, I am now giving an...

Our VLDB 2005 paper on the innards of our XQuery implementation is now available online . Shankar gave the presentation in Trondheim. As the previous conference papers, this paper gives an in-depth look into how we implement our XML and XQuery support...

The friendly folks of the F5 Networks Dev Central team interviewed me at PDC 2005. The 5 minute interview is now online (please accept my apologies for the rambling, but I seem to be recovering from the attendee party :-)).

The XML Query and XSL Working Groups have released the following Working Drafts of XML Query 1.0, XSL 2.0, XPath 2.0 and supporting documents. The goal of this release is to permit public review of changes made in response to Last Call comments. These...

Waehrend TechEd 2005 in Amsterdam hatte ich das Vergnuegen, mich mit Martin Szugat zu unterhalten . Das Interview ist jetzt veroeffentlicht. Ausserdem hat die neueste Ausgabe des dotnet Magazins SQL Server 2005 inklusive XML Support zum Schwerpunkt (...

First, we have released the September SQL Server 2005 CTP for download . This is the last CTP before the final release. Yeah! I will write my customary change blog on what has changed in the XML area a bit later this week. This year's PDC again...

Here is the high-level outline of the talk I am planning on presenting . Note that there is lots of ground to cover and only limited time. Thus, I am not planning on giving an in-depth XQuery tutorial but rather show several XQuery statements to give...

Recently, I received several customer reports, that sp_xml_preparedocument started rasing the following errors after upgrading their XML-based application from SQL Server 2000 SP3a (or earlier) to either SP4 or SQL Server 2005: Msg 6602, Level 16,...

I am deeply saddened by the suffering of the people in New Orleans and surroundings , South Alabama and Mississippi . My heart and best wishes go out to all the people bearing the tremendeous suffering and losses after hurricane Katrina. I encourage everyone...

I am back from vacation (no shark encounter :-)). I had a good time and have much more photos and dive reports to upload. While I was gone, Robert Scoble and Channel 9 published the video they took in my messy office before I went on vacation to give...