Euan Garden's BLOG

Details are here http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2008/06/07/sql-server-2008-rc0-now-available-for-subscribers.aspx

More info once I have mine downloaded and installed under Hyper V

Read all about it here http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2008/06/04/new-logo-for-sql-server-2008.aspx

Remind me to write a long and painfu post about the battle with Central Marketing during SQL 2000 as to why it was better(or NOT) to have a picture of a building on the box than the Red Braid that had been on many of the previous boxes

Somehow I managed to miss this one (thanks to Erland for the pointer). Folks have been asking for access to docs on TDS since before I was involved in SQL Server, well now you can peruse(all 124 pages) to your hearts content.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc448435.aspx

Ever had to take over the code for a system you did not define?

Ever found the documentation for such an app, to be ahemmm lacking?

Its  a fairly common ask from new app developers/ DBAs to find out if certain code is still being used for apps that have evolved over  a number of years. In SQL 2005 we added a DMV that allows you to work out if an index is being used or not. However the question still comes up about tables.

This came up recently on our internal SQL 2008 alias in the context of using sp_trace_setfilter, but Jack came up with  a better solution using audit.

create server audit unused_tables to file (‘c:\temp’)

go

alter server audit unused_tables with (state = on)

go

use database pubs

go

create database audit specification unused_tables for server audit unused_tables

add(select on authors by public),

add(insert on authors by public),

add(update on authors by public),

add(delete on authors by public)

go

alter database audit specification unused_tables with (state = on)

go

Then to check on it:

select * from sys.fn_get_audit_file(‘c:\temp\*.aud’, NULL, NULL)

go

Of course having found out that a bunch of tables are not being used what do you do? If you delete them the above data helps you feel pretty confident that they are not being used but its not perfect (classic example is the end of month, end of year reports...).

Hence I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader :-)

Jeff has a follow up post to the demos from Mix here. The silverlight unit test framework is based on a special build of mstest's infrastructure, targetted at CoreCLR.

How cool is that :-)

The SQL 2008, VS2008, Windows Sever 2008 launch event in the US happened this week. Dan Jones has some highlight features that were announced;

• T-SQL Debugger is back
• Object Search is back
• Activity Monitor has effectively been rewritten to improve perf and usefulness

Apparently there is an issue in the CTPs of SQL Server 2008 related to leap year.  Although there is no known impact on SQL Server 2005 or prior versions at this time. The result of this issue is that SQL Server 2008 services will not start during the 24 hours of Feb 29 GMT.

Action: Do NOT stop or restart any SQL Server 2008 services during those 24 hours.

. Modifying the system time is not a work-around, may cause side-effects, and is strongly discouraged.
. At this time, there is no known customer impact on SQL Server 2005 or prior versions
. There is no known danger of data corruption or security exposure
. This is on all editions of SQL Server 2008
. This is on all operating systems

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/prodinfo/download.mspx

Update: While this http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/bb851668.aspx page still says Nov it actually takes you to a page that is Feb, or says it is Feb. I'm downloading at home right now, if its the wrong version I will know in 20 mins.

If you were at Seattle Code Camp this morning and heard me mention the new WCF load testing work that our Ranger team has been doing, Jeff has a great summary post here.

Here is a nice picture of all the version numbers, now I still see a bunch of folks who are confused by the info that comes out of SQL Server in terms of versions, so try running the following script;

set nocount on

go

 

select @@version

go

 

select 'Edition: ' + convert(char(30), serverproperty('Edition'))

go

 

select 'Product Version: ' + convert(char(20), serverproperty('ProductVersion'))

go

 

select 'Product Level: ' + convert(char(20),serverproperty('ProductLevel'))

go

 

set nocount off

go

The answer for my RTM instance looks like this;

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - 9.00.1399.06 (Intel X86)

Oct 14 2005 00:33:37

Copyright (c) 1988-2005 Microsoft Corporation

Developer Edition on Windows NT 5.2 (Build 3790: Service Pack 2)

-----------------------------

Edition: Developer Edition

-------------------------------------

Product Version: 9.00.1399.06

-----------------------------------

Product Level: RTM

The piece of data that confused most people is the part I have highlighted orange, this is the NT Service Pack Level, not the SQL Service Pack level. Part of the reason that folks jump to the conclusion is that the basic information in the first query is very detailed but the one piece it is really missing is the SP level :-) This can be retrieved by using Product Level instead.

Update: Changed the Char(20) to a Char(30) per the comments for Edition

I love our MVPs (most of the time <g>) I was about to sit down, after watching the Seahawks win the division again, and write a lap around the November CTP from a test perspective. However Grant Holliday has 2 great posts.

In general he gets it all right, including the speculation about what Shared Step Sets are for, but the one big step he misses (and I have sent him mail on this). If you re-open a test case after running it once with background recording on, then you can play the case back automatically.

Nice work Grant:

November Rosario CTP - Planning A Testing Effort with Camano

November Rosario CTP - Executing Manual Test Cases

Title says it all, but is this really a feature you can benefit from or is it some piece of random engineering that the dev team decided to do because it would be "fun"?

One of the big challenges with SSRS has always been config, in fact I would argue its a problem for all of SQL Server 2005 so much so that we added a completely new tool to help manage it (technically it was 2, SQL Config Manager and Surface Area Config but SQl-CM really replaced 3 smaller utils that had been around for years). In general SQL 2008 is moving to a cleaner config model (and the separation of setup into copy and config).

Config simplification is one of the reasons for the move to not use IIS, but the other is around memory, thread and scale management, if you have every tried to generate a 100 page PDF report you will know what I mean.

Brian has a great article describing the reasons behind the change in detail, my investigation on a 40 page report with CTP-5 shows a decent improvement in rendering time, but with a greatly reduced memory load during rendering. While in VSTS we don't tend to generate a lot of multi-page reports we do have a  lot of concurrent users and the reports can be pretty memory intensive.

Looking forward to the RTM bits.

I've talked about the SQLCAT team before and the great content they produce, you may have had a chance to sit in on one of their sessions at PASS or elsewhere. Well the team is trying a new outlet, richer than the std blog interface, they are testing a new web site.

They've started out with some great top ten lists,

Storage Top 10 Best Practices

Top SQL Server 2005 Performance Issues for OLTP Applications

Top 10 SQL Server 2005 Performance Issues for Data Warehouse and Reporting Applications

Top 10 Hidden Gems in SQL Server 2005

One of the great things about the info the team shares is you know it comes from real world (sometimes hard learned) practical experiences. Check it out and give them some feedback.

There are a bunch of features in SQL 2008 that have been on the ask list for a VERY long time. I suspect DATE and TIME types will win the prize as I remember asking for these as a customer of 6.5 10 years ago. However one that's been around for a long time (I remember hearing it asked for as part of 7.0) is the spatial data type support. Given the prevalence of GPS data online, geo services (http://maps.live.com etc) and location based services the time seems right to move this capability much more into the mainstream. Its been a long journey I first remember hearing about GIS back in 92 when a colleague was involved in GIS startup project in the local government org that we worked at. I was especially jealous at the time as they had 2 color SPARC stations (the only SPARCS in the org period) and we had to make do with our 80286s :-)

In the intervening years companies like ESRI have made great strides in moving the adoption of these technologies forward, it will be interesting to see how putting them into the core of SQL Server changes this landscape as there have been some very impressive solutions built using SQL Server 2000/2005 and partners over the last few years.

All right, before I started playing with this myself I decided to do a little research, here is what I came up with;

Web Cast by 2 PMs working on the project.

Blog of Isaac, one of the 2 PMs from the Web Cast

MSDN Forum for Spatial Support

VERY high level data sheet

However the best source of info I found was good ol Roger Doherty (a man I have almost never forgiven me for huge amounts of pain and late nights he caused me when was the ISV Evangelist for BI and I was a Dev Mgr for BI start up...) who is starting the SQL2008 ISV evangelism train as we speak. In the time I have known him roger has spent most of his time as an evangelist but he also worked as a dev on a feature we shipped in Server 2003, so he has a good technical background. His demo app uses the new Geo types along with FILESTREAM in what I would imagine is going to be a very typical app type.

This blog entry has a WEALTH of information that I have so far found invaluable.

The only disappointing thing I have found so far (and I am still researching ) is that it appears that SQL2008 uses flat-earth geometry and not curved earth. The app I am trying to build uses Great Circle Lines, which means I might be busted for now.

UPDATE: Isaac says there is support for round earth in Geography, looks like I have a fun weekend ahead.

For those of you who remember the "fun" days of the Yukon + Whidbey dance you are likely trying to forget the challenges of getting good builds of both that would work together via the same NetFx, Shell etc. Well this should be much less of a problem going fwds and as such the VS team has just released support for the Nov CTP of SQL 2008, you can get it here. VS2008 support to follow.