- GROUP BY ALL
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Did you know such a thing ever existed? Check this post from SQLTeam on the GROUP BY ALL feature here.
- Dell articles on SQL 2008
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While browsing I just stumbled upon these articles from Dell. A good read:
Deployment Guide
SQL 2008 - Whitepaper
- SQL Server 2008 - Experiences
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If you are in India and have installed SQL Server 2008 as a POC in your companies doing some sort of migration, upgrade or even evaluating new features like Filestream, XML, Geo Spatial etc - I would like to know more from you. Please drop me a line at - ITPro[at]ExtremeExperts.com.
I would also be interested if you have done something specific around Win Server 2008 (Virtualization, NAP or IIS 7) too.
- Suggest: Want a SQL Server Session?
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As an Evangelist I get an opportunity to do a variety of sessions for the India sub and I am sure I would have met quite a few of you who read my post via the events channel. As much as I try to keep the sessions content loaded, I would like to take this opportunity to also solicit your views on what will be your top 5 session requests. In otherwords, what would be the sessions that will help YOU in your day-today activities(SQL2005) and help YOU prep-up on future products(SQL2008).
What I want from you -
- Categorize as SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 topics
- Your session requests can be on various tracks like: SQL Administration, SQL Standards, SQL Developer, SQL Data Modelling, SQL Scripting, SQL Performance, SQL Tuning, SQL BI, Data Warehousing, VLDB, High Availability, Security, Data Loading, Best practices etc
Now you can see I have tons of ideas and variety of sessions that I want to take on various tracks. But if YOU had to priortize and suggest which would be those 5 topics on SQL 2005 and Top 5 on SQL 2008 - Which ones would they be?
You can drop a comment on this post or you can drop me a line on ITPro[at]ExtremeExperts.com and I will consolidate it as part of this post.
Lastly, you have my commitment and I will surely *try* to address them during the course of this year.
- Row Versioning Overheads
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Sunil takes a shot at explaining the nuances of Row versioning and what are the facts one need to know when working with such data. Catch the same here.
- SQL 2008 Whitepapers
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Ravi does a really good work in consolidating the whitepapers on SQL Server 2008 topics.
- How it works section
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Catch some really cool posts by the PSS support engineers on various SQL Server topics. These are HOW TO topics, crip yet lots of internal behaviours explained.
- Windows XP SP3 - Update
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Yup, you read it right. XP SP3 is RTMed to the OEM and Enterprise customer. Read the thread here. Interestingly as much as people are thinking on Vista deployment people are asking whether Windows XP Professional with SP3 is good enough that they can forgo deploying the Windows Vista operating system. The debate can go on and on - but here is a quick whitepaper that outlines some of the differences between these two.
- IIS Memory Management
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Here are a couple of posts on IIS Memory Management by Siva. Some really good detailing mentioned here and here.
- IIS7 - Performance Analysis Reports
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Here is a post that outlines with simple steps to attack your web server behaviour on IIS7 using the out-of-box reports. Read the post here.
- Virtual TechDays - April 9 & 10th
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With Windows and Visual Studio writing their track I wanted to talk about our very own wonderful 3 tracks of SQL Server session each having 4 sessions each. The first track is "BI and Admin" track. As much as these both require their very own tracks we already were running high on the number of sessions hence had to combine them together. We have Analysis Services (SSAS) enhancements done by the product team directly streamed for you from Redmond. Dont miss it!!! And with the success that I see from the field on the Integration Services (SSIS) and Reporting Services (SSRS) we wanted to have one session on these too. A lot has been added as part of RS wherein a lot of the charts, heat-map and some great visualizations are added. Lots of fun not to be missed. Next on this track we get slightly deep on two important features that will be like a dream come true for any Administrators - Resource Governor and Partitioning Enhancements. I will be doing the Resource Governor session and this is surely close to my heart with the level of capabilities it opens in managing the resources (CPU and memory).
The Day 1 has another track which has 4 more sessions on SQL Server !!! Did you say two sessions on SQL running in parallel ? - Yup, you are right. We are giving you some great sessions here too. Well, this is the RDBMS track. We start with compression - people have their own doubts on this feature and this complete 60 mins session both from a data and backup compression will clear all your doubts. Then I am back with the "Upgrade Considerations" for SQL Server 2008. I know most of you will be migrating or upgrading with an in-place upgrade and this session will surely help you. Then we move to T-SQL Enhancements in SQL Server 2008 and finally we close this track with a new feature CDC which is the logging framework with-in SQL Server 2008 given to you as an out-of-the-box feature.
Then we move to Day 2, where we have one special track for SQL Server and we have made this as a Security and High-Availability track. We have some great speakers on this track too. We start the day with Encryption enhancements in SQL Server 2008. There are aspects like Transparent Data Encryption, External Key Management and others which will be discussed here. We then turn into the Auditing aspect which we introduced newly as a feature with SQL 2008. Post the lunch we have sessions around High-Availability and Policy-based management framework discussed in length. You will see that this track is critical for all our enterprise administrators who will find everything on this track very exciting stuff coming their way.
I have just given you an heads-up on what to expect from our SQL tracks. But wait for specific blogs over the next few days as we get ready for the event scheduled on 9th and 10th April.
- Data Models - Get some good starting points
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Here is the site ...
- SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Beta for ADO.Net Entity Framework
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Check the details for the same here.
- SQLCAT Toolbox
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This is cool. We know these have been around for a while. Here is all the tools in one page consolidated. Check it out here.
- Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008
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Add-ins to VS 2008 to work for SL 2. Download the same here.