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There's some good news filtering into my inbox today about SQL Server bugs that have been fixed in the upcoming CTP (i.e. CTP6).Title: SSIS: Raw files throw an error at 4GB Description: It is not possible to load more than 4GB of data into a raw file. Status: Resolved (Fixed) Link: ...

SQL Server 2008 is upon us and if there is one feature about which I am somewhat excited (sad geek, I know) is the plethora of new data types designed purely to store dates and times. To explain the reasons for this excitement let me just list the problems with existing SQL types. The first major issue is that of resolution: Smalldatetime has ...

Hallelujah. Finally SQL Server Management Studio has caught up with the rest of the world and started offering intellisense within SQL Server Management Studio. Here's some screen shots:   CTRL-J brings up a list of all available objects for a FROM clause   Specifying part of a fully-qualified name (which you all use, right?) ...

Just like Andrea Merkel, Tottenham Hotspur and Britney Spears' career, the Lookup task in SSIS 2005 is in serious need of a makeover. Whilst it is one of the more useful components in the SSIS toolbox it has a number of shortcomings including: Inability to dynamically build the SQL statement that populates the cache when in 'Full Cache' mode ...

Spotted in pre-CTP5. Right-click on a table and see 2 new options:Select Top 1000 RowsEdit Top 200 Rows As I say, very simple. But for large tables those will be very handy. Can you think of any other small bug significant improvements that you'd like to see made to SQL Server Management Studio? Buck Woody wants to hear about ...

October was my least productive blogging month since I began blogging almost 3 years ago to the day. Don't worry though I'm not giving up the blogging, I've spent a fair part of October on annual leave and I've been blogging pretty heavily elsewhere as well. Also, there hasn't been that much to write about lately although ...

Back in June I talked about some T-SQL enhancements that are coming our way in SQL Server 2008. One of those things is the ability to define multiple rows in an INSERT statement like so:insert t1 values (@i),(@i+1); Very cool stuff.  Some people seem to be naming this feature 'row constructors'. Well Greg Duncan has been ...

''Why the <insert your favourite expletive here> doesn't SSIS support C# for the script task and script component?''   I've heard the above complaint, in various different ways, many many times over the past 18 months since SQL Server 2005 was released. Its a valid complaint to which there is a valid answer (which I'm not going ...

SQL Server 2005 includes the WITH CUBE and WITH ROLLUP syntaxes that are used to display summary information for combinations of columns in the GROUP BY clause. That's useful functionality but it didn't provide particularly fine-grained control over what summaries were returned. Essentially it was all-or-nothing. In katmai, the next ...

A very short post here showing some of the new T-SQL constructs in katmai. Check out the following code snippet:declare @i int = 1;set @i += 1; create table t1 (col1 int);insert t1 values (@i),(@i+1); There are actually three syntax enhancements in there. Can you spot them? No? Let me fill you in:Initialisation at the same time as ...