August 2009 - Posts

• Dr. OUTPUT or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the MERGE

  It would be fair to say that there aren't a huge number of programmability features added to SQL Server 2008 that will have a great impact on most of our day-to-day lives as SQL Server developers. The release was clearly manageability themed rather than Read More... Posted Monday, August 24, 2009 4:31 PM by Adam Machanic | 13 Comments Filed under: Performance, sql server 2008, MERGE, logging, OUTPUT, ETL

• Who is Active? v8.82 - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

  I've had a lot of great feedback since my last "official" Who is Active? release-- v8.40, back in March --and since then I've made 42 distinct changes, bringing us all the way to v8.82. My versioning scheme is quite simple: one change, one increment, Read More... Posted Thursday, August 20, 2009 12:03 PM by Adam Machanic | 13 Comments Filed under: Scripts, DMVs, who is active, monitoring Attachment(s): who_is_active_v8_82.zip

• Full Outline for my PASS Pre-Con: SQLCLR From Beginner to Expert

  Since the announcement of my SQLCLR pre-conference seminar at this November's PASS conference I have received a few e-mails asking for more detail about what I will be covering. In addition to the Q&A I did with PASS , I thought it might be helpful Read More... Posted Monday, August 17, 2009 11:00 AM by Adam Machanic | 2 Comments Filed under: Performance, SQLCLR, PASS 2009

• Uniquely Identifying XML Nodes with DENSE_RANK

  When working with XML in SQL Server, you might want to uniquely identify one node against another. But due to the flexibility with which XML can be defined, this is not always directly possible. SQL Server's own XML structures are guilty of having this Read More... Posted Monday, August 03, 2009 9:43 AM by Adam Machanic | 7 Comments Filed under: xml, dense_rank