October 2007 - Posts

• Winners Announced

  All the book winners have been sent email. If your name is on this list, but you haven't received an email from me, please check your junk mail folder, and also confirm that the email address you sent me with your entry was correct. The first prize winner, Read More... Posted Sunday, October 28, 2007 2:28 PM by Kalen Delaney | 20 Comments Filed under: prizes, anniversary, raffle

• Geek City: Poor (Wo)Man's Load Testing

  Last July, I posted about a way to run a batch multiple times when you use GO as the batch separator. I usually take advantage of this technique when I am loading test data into a table. I was mentioning this feature to my class last week in Minneapolis, Read More... Posted Wednesday, October 24, 2007 1:28 PM by Kalen Delaney | 12 Comments Filed under: Tools, GO, testing

• Did You Know? Only 3 days left!

  My 20 year anniversary is only 3 days away, and that is the day I will randomly select from all the entries in my anniversary raffle. However, for those of you in the British Isles there are more chances to win books and other prizes. I am doing a 20th Read More... Posted Wednesday, October 24, 2007 12:23 PM by Kalen Delaney | 19 Comments

• Did You Know? What's a $ Worth?

  No, I'm not talking about US dollars, which are not worth much at all these days. I'm talking about the $ used in a particular construct in SQL Server 2005 to get information about a partition definition. There is a construct called $PARTITION which the Read More... Posted Saturday, October 13, 2007 5:29 PM by Kalen Delaney | 10 Comments Filed under: metadata, partition functions, bug

• Geek City: Detecting Overflowing Columns

  SQL Server 2005 allows rows to include variable length columns which do not actually fit in the maximum row size of 8060 bytes. I previously posted about row-overflow columns, and discussed the maximum number of such columns that you could have in a single Read More... Posted Tuesday, October 9, 2007 12:27 PM by Kalen Delaney | 16 Comments Filed under: rowsize, row-overflow, internals, storage, DBCC

• Did You Know? It's Almost My 20th Anniversary!

  Maybe this post should have been a Geek City post, because 20 years is the length of time I've been working with SQL Server! Some people might think it's very geeky to spend 20 years working with the same software product. I started working with the Sybase Read More... Posted Thursday, October 4, 2007 1:47 PM by Kalen Delaney | 20 Comments Filed under: books, prizes, anniversary, raffle