So, like most funny stories (involving me), this one starts with “Yesterday, I had this bright idea...” and goes downhill from there. Database mirroring is great. Full stop. But there’s this one little catch: it can only have a single mirror copy of the principal. Awesome for HA, but not so good for...

I’ve really enjoyed my ~3.5 years here at Microsoft, especially the last year and a quarter inside SQL Server. Microsoft’s a great company that really takes good care of its employees and their families. It’s with some sadness that I leave all my friends in Building 35 next week (and some of y’all over...

Look at all of them fixin’ to jump in the pool! Heh. Not to minimize the difficulty that they’re embarking on, what with a 20% pass rate and all, but it’s great to see more people diving into the deep end of the SQL Server pool. Let’s hope as many Certified Masters as possible emerge from the other end...

When I was an operations DBA, this would probably fall into the category of “just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should”: Call a WCF Service from SQLCLR (by Niels Berglund) However, there are probably a couple of good scenarios where I might advocate for doing just this in future...

I’m a couple days behind in, well, everything, not just my inbox. What can I say? It finally warmed up enough to get back on the motorcycle... Updated BOL for January 2009 are out there now! MSDN Download Center (MSI) Get yours while supplies last. Heh.

Until today, all of the various SQL Server community and samples projects each had their own discussion board on CodePlex. In the interests of simplification that our customers have asked for in our samples experience, we’re consolidating all of those disparate discussion locations to one MSDN forum...

A SQL Ranger friend of mine in the UK gave me the heads up to this yesterday. (Thanks, Ben!!) Apparently, back in December 2008, Sybase ported some of our samples to SQL Anywhere. Needless to say, I’ve got mixed feelings about Sybase porting AdventureWorks to their platform. Sort of like a cherry-cheese...

Earlier this week, the gravitational pull of Twitter got the better of me. Jimmy May emailed me that Paul Nielsen was trying to sort out the gender of the fictitious IT Manager of AdventureWorks (Jean Trenary) for the next edition of the SQL Server Bible and was tweeting on the subject. One thing led...

Davide describes it best in his own words: What is DTLoggedExec? If I were a full-time ETL developer or an operations DBA, this is definitely a tool I’d be using every day. Grab yours today from CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/DTLoggedExec/

Over the holidays, the SQL Server community & samples test team in China has been migrating all of our open product samples bugs out of our internal VSTS bug tracking database and into the VSTS database which backs the CodePlex TFS system. There are some non-bug work items which will be migrated...

If you’ve got data, there are probably people who want to use it, analyze it, do things with it... that you never imagined and possibly don’t want them to. “Those people” might even be government agents. Who can put you in jail. If you’re not careful with your data. Do you have a plan for data governance...

We’re doing planning work for SQL Server Kilimanjaro and the next SQL Server wave that follows it, which means product samples, community projects and AdventureWorks. Some people have suggested doing away with AdventureWorks in favor of something new, but I don’t see that happening... unless there is...

No new features. Lots of good fixes rolled up in one package. Download details: SQL Server 2005 SP3 Beta We don’t call them “service packs” inside SQL Server anymore, but it would seem that a lot of people have a Linus’ blanket reaction to the term, so we’ll call it SP3 to make everyone happy. Enjoy...

FYI, we’re actively working on improving the setup experience for the SQL Server 2008 sample databases (aka AdventureWorks). We’ve heard your feedback and we’re acting on it. Here are some of the salient points you’ll see for the Halloween update (Samples Refresh 1): Fewer selections to make to choose...

The humorous old adage (which my friends in PR righteously deplore) is that "There's no such thing as bad press, as long as they spell your name right." SQL Server 2008: First Impressions Desperately Seeking Samples SQL Server 2008 Transact-SQL Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Recipes...

Being a big fan of test-driven development of any kind, database or otherwise, I was honored to sit on a panel with some other much smarter people than I at TechEd*2008 entitled "Testing the SQL Database." Not only did I get to opine a bit, but I also got to learn some, too, which happens whenever you...

I realize that I'm normally off-topic, so it's weird for me to actually be blogging about SQL Server on my vacation... Figures.     I've blogged before about the Real Reason™ that most guys my age (at least in the USA) got into software development: video games. Back in my day, they wasen't even much...

A little snafu delayed things, but they're all signed, sealed and delivered now. I only had to skip a little of the launch party to get them out the door... Microsoft SQL Server Community & Samples - Release: SQL Server 2008 RTM Enjoy!

One of the shiny new features added to Management Studio for 2008 allows you to plot spatial data for any table that has geography or geometry data in the new spatial types. This comes in pretty handy for doing quick visual inspection of small spatial data sets... and it turns out that my early suspicion...

This popped up earlier this year, and I thought it was cool enough to put in the blog backlog. How Microsoft IT Uses SQL Server 2005 to Power a Global Forensic Data Security Tool (TechNet) Technical White Paper | IT Pro Webcast | TechNet Radio I'm always intrigued with forensic applications. Maybe it...

Actually, my oldest son is the original Captain Obvious in my life, but Michael Campbell does a good impression of him in Performance Secrets for SQL Server Developers (sqlmag.com) . Heh. Not that it's a bad thing. Being reminded of the obvious every once in a while is important. For the record, the...

This cool toolkit went AWOL from the Download Center some time ago and has been hiding on Skydrive for a while now, but it seemed to me that it deserves a better home than that... So I created a resource page for it in the MSDN Code Gallery. SQL Server Metadata Toolkit - Home The current release for...

I'm still recovering from three weeks OOF, but my teammates in Redmond and Beijing have done a great job getting the next preview of SQL Server 2008 samples ready for you. The main CodePlex portal for SQL Server Samples has links to all the individual projects. But if you want to just grab the whole...

I've gotten questions over the past month or two from folks (mostly DBAs and trainers) who have attended FUD dissemination events where various "experts" have declared The Relational Database™ to be dead. Ha! I've had a good laugh at most of the points that the so-called "experts"...

In the dim and distant past, I picked up the 5±2 thing rule. I'm sure it has a fancy, academified name... but Tribal Video Game Knowledge™ has edged it into the recycler in my brain. My oldest son is trying to convince me to buy enough copies of Sins of a Solar Empire that the "whole...