...over at www.stuartpa.com

When changing the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Account you might get back this rather alarming error message box: --------------------------- WMI Provider Error --------------------------- The process terminated unexpectedly. [0x8007042b] ---...

This one is a little odd: But, when using the new ' ADD SIGNATURE ' DDL in SQL Server 2005, if you are using SQLOLEDB through the SQLNCLI (SQL Native Client) protocol stack, i.e. the stack the new command line utility SQLCMD uses, you will get the following...

Late last week, I was using the new ' User Instance ' support in SQL Express 2005. I was connecting from home using Remote Desktop to my main office machine, and when trying to connect to SQL Express, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the following...

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 introduces a new feature set, known internally as 'Secret Storage'. Secret Storage is the overall umbrella technology for the data encryption facilities in the SQL Server database engine, including the key management story. The...

In an earlier post , I said it will be possible to change the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 service account passwords without requiring a service restart. Today we found a corner case. It turns out, when you install SQL Server 2005 32 bit editions on an x64...

In the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, available for free here , there is new connection string option: 'user instance=true'. When this connection string option is specified, the SQL Express instance you are connecting to (we call this the parent instance...

A couple of weeks ago, we checked-in a feature to Microsoft SQL Server 2005, that allows the various Service Account passwords to be changed, using the SQL Server Configuration Manager, without having to restart the respective services. NOTE: It is...

One of the most interesting new features in SQL Server 2005 is Service Broker. If you need more details on what it is and why you would want to use it, I will let the expert tell you . But, if you want to get it setup and configured on your machine now...

In my last post , I said we would look at how we could return a table that contains a directory listing of all the .xml files on my machine. Using the SQL/CLR LoadFile method we created in the last post, our goal is to come up with a single T/SQL statement...

Up until now, XML documents have generally languished as mere files in the lowly file-system, our relational database systems haven’t seen them as important enough to warrant inclusion, up until SQL Server 2005 that is. In SQL Server 2005, XML documents...

As we work on wrapping up the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 release (formerly known as 'Yukon'), I am taking some time to play with some of the newer features, looking for those last, hard to find, bugs that maybe still hiding out. As I come across topics...