Celebrating the first day of Summer with the first technical post on the blog since mid-Winter (apologies for my absence).. Jens has a great post regarding the internal behavior of various forms of sp_-named programmability objects. Some SQLRAP-related research led me to take a different tack, and...

This page will serve as a compendium of Pond’s Laws posts. The individual posts which promulgate the laws may be found as follows: Pond's First through Tenth Laws Pond's Eleventh Law Pond's Twelfth Law Pond's Thirteenth Law Pond's Laws of System Design (or, How To Be A Competent Professional...

Thanks to yet another kick-in-the-pants from Jimmy May (did he play soccer as a youth?) the Pond’s Laws Home Page is now live. Jimmy wanted to find all of Pond’s Laws in one place, and now he (and you) can. There’s also a link to the new page in the A Bit More From Me section to your left (if you...

You might have heard about this somewhere else.. but Windows 7 was launched today . I recently got an upgraded laptop from my employer, upon which I installed Windows 7. Both the machine and the software are quite remarkable. First, the machine, so you can see how sweetly I’m riding these days...

Herewith, a discussion of the emergence of Pond’s Thirteenth Law (if you need to catch up, here are Laws One through Ten , Eleven , and Twelve , as well as three ruminations on the implications of Pond’s Seventh Law ).. One of the great things about my job is that I get to spend an embarrassing amount...

Two Microsoft folks frequently featured in this space, Microsoft Certified Masters Jimmy May and Jens Suessmeyer , have joined forces to bring to the world SQLIOSimParser, a tool to parse and interpret the XML output of the Bob Dorr’s SQLIOSim testing tool. Jimmy says Jens did most of the heavy lifting...

After a long hiatus , Pond’s Laws of System Design (or, How to Be a Competent Professional in an Irrational World) returns. Thanks to Jimmy May for a kick-in-the-pants on this topic several months ago; I hope he’ll understand why I just had to wait until right now to publish this post (the clue lies...

Courtesy of Jens Suessmeyer comes this little gem purloined from an internal discussion; cut-and-paste this into SQL Server Management Studio and see if you can answer the questions in the comments before you execute the script: --   create and populate a table variable DECLARE @Demonstration TABLE...

With SQLRAP 2.5 out the door a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been free to turn to another project, SIPA, an internal effort to automate storage and retrieval of our group’s diverse intellectual property catalog. I’m acting as both the database architect and one of the database implementers on the project...

Actually, I’m about a month late to the party on this one..  but I’ve been busy.. Cumulative Upgrade 4 for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 is available for download here . The SQL Server Release team discusses the SP3 release here and the SP2 release here .  Aaron Bertrand has a nice discussion...

Now go away, or we shall taunt you a second time. - John Cleese as a French knight (picture at left); Monty Python and the Holy Grail One of the reasons I started blogging over four years ago was my conviction that the coding challenges with which my employer was presenting me, while stimulating and...

Make a note..  here’s my first useful programming tip for SQL Server 2008 (and yes, there will be more to come; I’m about a week and a half into my first SQL Server 2008 development project).. Way back in February of aught-seven, I shared Jerry’s solution for running the .modify() method against...

Last week I was tagged by Jorge Segarra (a/k/a @SQLChicken) in a meme started by Chris Shaw , who asked a great question about leaders in one’s career.  In reflecting on my response , it occurred to me that there was only one of the people I listed who it was possible for me to be in touch with...

Paul Randal has another must-read post regarding a performance bug which surfaces in earlier versions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 when NOLOCK scans are executed against tables with off-row LOB data.  Both the causal scenario and the nature of the fix are clearly discussed. Get your geek...

Consider this post a parable about what can happen if you let Twitter into your life.. I spent part of my day researching a particular capability of the TechSmith Camtasia Studio software my colleague Venkata Raj Pochiraju has been using to record readiness materials for our upcoming SQLRAP 2.5 release...

UPDATED 25 April 2009 to fix the link to Jimmy’s blog As a consequence of my recent ascension to Twitterato-hood (follow me @sqltwit), I’ve made several new SQL friends over the last couple of weeks.  One of those is Jorge Segarra (a/k/a @SQLChicken in the Twitterverse), a SQL DBA and Systems administrator...

TechNet magazine has released a web-only “Green IT” edition as a companion piece to Mark Pohto’s recent white paper and article in The Architecture Journal. The issue features a valuable collection of new and archived articles on energy efficient computing, including: · Framework for Building a “Hyper...

Sad news today that Jong Ku Kim, a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft Services, on Tuesday lost an 18-month battle with cancer at the age of 39.  He leaves behind a wife, a seven year-old, son, family, friends, and a globe-spanning cadre of colleagues who all mourn his untimely passing. I first...

UPDATED 13 April 2009: The SAPWD parameter sets the sa password; use BLANKSAPWD if you don’t wish to set one.  I’ve updated the seventh paragraph below accordingly. One of our responsibilities in the ITOE IP Architects group (the artists formerly known as the Exchange, SQL Server, and Windows Centers...

Paul ’s latest survey is a deep dive into the physical layout of your databases. It’s the same basic question, for four different size categories of database: what’s the physical layout of your database, and why? Paul will publish the results on 24 April, so please respond before then! -wp ...

I meant to.  I really did. But I got sick last week , and my energy level has been slow enough to come back that my focus was entirely elsewhere until about six last night. I panicked.  I gave fleeting consideration to throwing something hasty together, but everything I came up with struck...

One of the most popular posts in the history of this little corner of the Internets is one from August, 2005, which describes a method for accessing stored procedure output in a SELECT statement which I’ve come to refer to as “ the OPENROWSET trick .” On the occasion of this blog’s 750th post(!),...

I’m a little late to the party here, but this is pretty apropos of some of our discussions here lately. Brent Ozar is hosting a Disaster Recovery Horror Stories webcast this morning at 11a ET/8a PT.  You can read the full details here . I don’t think I’ll be able to attend, but it looks like an...

And I remember what she said to me How she swore that it never would end I remember how she held me, oh so tight Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then Bob Seger, Against the Wind All you need is love Love is all you need John Lennon and Paul McCartney, All You Need is Love My pal Jimmy May apparently...

Paul’s name should be familiar to denizens of the SQL Server blogosphere. Along with his wife, Kimberley Tripp , he’s a principal of SQL Skills (home also to the redoubtable Bob Beauchemin , with whom I share a birth date of significance to SQL Server aficionados); given that his history includes authorship...