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 programmability themed, and I can count the most interesting and far-reaching developer ...

I'm a day early; sorry.  But I have a lot of interesting items to share this week. ======================================== More control over TOP (n) in DML This week I realized that the workarounds for affecting which row(s) are impacted by UPDATE/DELETE TOP (n) were cumbersome, and so I asked for an extension of TOP that allows you to ...

During SQL Server 2008 beta testing, Aaron Bertrand noted that the value of @@rowcount inside a trigger could be unexpected, if the triggering statement was MERGE. The consequences of this can be pretty bad, but fortunately there's a simple workaround. You need to do something if anyone might invoke MERGE against tables with triggers that ...

Slides and demos for my hdc08omaha talks are now available for download from http://tinyurl.com/5oykgj Thanks to all who attended!

On 6 August 2008, I will be giving a presentation to the Omaha SQL/BI User Group on the new features in SQL Server 2008 Integration Services. We will talk about improvements in scripting, how the redesigned pipeline improves performance and how to leverage the new Cache Transform to improve package performance. Quinn Jones from Farm Credit ...

Yesterday I drove down from Sioux Falls to Omaha so that I could catch a talk being given by Sudhir Gajre to the Omaha SQL Server/BI Interest Group. I first got to know Sudhir when he, I and Luke Schollmeyer were restarting a SQL Server Users Group in Omaha. Sudhir is a stud at SQL Server performance tuning and helped write one of the best papers ...

Hey folks! Yes, I am alive, but as you can imagine, I am spending my time chewing on SQL Server 2008 and have limited time to post much. But today, I received an email that I wanted to post on since this is a common question. ''How do I shred an XML document into a table.'' The big issue here is that there really is not one best way to do it. If ...