Did You Know? You can search the web-only Books Online

Kalen Delaney — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:22:00 GMT

You might be aware (from other bloggers on this site) that there is a new web-only Books Online for SQL Server 2008 available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd239407.aspx.

Like Tibor, I prefer a downloadable BOL, partly because I do a lot of research and writing while traveling and I don't always have an internet connection, like at 42,000 ft (~14000m) above the Atlantic Ocean.

However, I need the latest documentation while I am finishing up my book, so I decided to start using it today, now that I am back from my travels to the UK. However, I discovered another reason while I like the desktop copy of BOL better and that is the searching functionality. The web-only BOL only has the search box to search the ENTIRE MSDN site, and it's not nearly as convenient as the search capabilities in the local documentation.

To my delight, I just found out from Alan Brewer, from the SQL Documentation Team, that Microsoft has a nice search macro to help limit your search on MSDN to just SQL Server 2008 topics:

http://search.live.com/macros/sql_server_user_education/sql2008bolsearch/

It's still not as nice as the local searching, but since web-only is all we have for now, for the most recent BOL, it's definitely a good thing.

There is also a 2005 online search macro at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverue/archive/2007/10/01/eliminate-extranneous-search-results.aspx

Have fun!

~Kalen

Did You Know? It's in the Books Online!

Kalen Delaney — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 02:25:00 GMT

Did you know you can ALTER an existing column to give it the identity property?

If you look up ALTER TABLE in the BOL index, you'll see this:

ALTER TABLE table_name
{ [ ALTER COLUMN column_name
       {DROP DEFAULT |
         SET DEFAULT constant_expression |
         IDENTITY [ ( seed , increment ) ] }

....

I had been telling people for years that you couldn't change the identity property of an existing column, but there is was. And if you can't trust BOL, who can you trust?

Then I looked again.

Oops... this was ALTER TABLE for SQL Server Compact Edition, which has very different syntax in many cases. But the CE entry seems to always come up first whenever I do a search or use the Index. There are some workarounds however.

In the Search Dialog, right under the wide search field, is a drop-list list next to the word "Technology". Click the down-arrow and you'll see a list of checkboxes which allow you pick and choose which elements of Books Online you want to search. You can uncheck SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition. However, that only affects the search operations. If you use the Index, you'll still see CE content. There's good news here too. There is a Filtered by: drop-down list at the top of the index list, and you can choose which content you're interested in. For this list however, the choice is all or one. I can choose just to see SQL Server Database Engine, but I can't choose to see everything BUT Compact Edition.

But wait. I just found out about a really clever trick, from former SQL Server MVP Umachandar Jayachandran, who now works on the SQL team at Microsoft:

You can use the Help Collection Manager in BOL to remove the SQLCE content
entirely. This will filter it from the index too. You can access the Help
Collection Manager from:

ms-help://MS.SQLCC.v9/sqlcc9/html/b06d0f98-ef00-4b03-9f5d-b5c184b8df92.htm
Search for below if you can't use the link above:
Adding and Removing Help Collections

The URL can be entered directly into a browser, or into the URL text box at the top of the main BOL content screen.

Have fun!

~Kalen

Kalen Delaney : BOL

Did You Know? You can search the web-only Books Online

Did You Know? It's in the Books Online!