DateTime MasterClass
Everything you ever wanted to know about the DateTime datatype - hints, tricks, myths and more ... Source : Tibor Karaszi - Karaszi.com - Article
MERGE statement with Optimistic Concurrency
If I was a Gartner analyst, this one would be titled something like "Merging the old and new; Exploiting Synergies for Elegant Design". I'm not sure what Synergy Exploitation involves (I'm not sure it's legal either!), but this probably comes close. In this post, Simon describes combining new features in SQL Server 2008 (MERGE and Table Valued Parameters) with the classic optimistic locking design to enable the passing of multiple rows into a stored procedure for insert/update (i.e.; merge) into an existing table, and as per the optimistic locking methodology, if ANY of the rows have changed, the whole operation is aborted. Very nice. ... Source : Simon Sabin - SQLBlogcasts.com - Blog Post
Performance Troubleshooting Flowchart
The SQLCat team keep delivering great content. This one's no exception; a flowchart to address the most common performance and scalability issues that crop up. Read left to right and top down, it addresses the big issues first such as table scans and out of date stats and includes links to recommended reading. Great stuff ... Source : Sharon Bjeletich - SQLCat.com
Policy Based Management - Evaluation with Powershell
A great series of blog posts from Lara on Policy Based Management. In this one, she demonstrates how we can use powershell scripting to evaluate policies. Whilst not required for SQL Server 2008 instances (as we can store/automate policies in the server) it's a great technique for automating policy checks against older SQL Server instances (2000 and 2005) ... Source : Lara Rubbelke - SQLBlog.com - Blog Post
Policy Based Management - Facet-Evaluation Mode-Target Mapping
I've been looking for a blog post like this for a while. As well as explaining the concepts behind Policy Based Management, Dan provides a matrix which maps Facets by Target Type (and Target Types by Facet) as well as listing the supported evaluation modes for each facet. In a related post, Peter DeBetta provides a script to list the mappings. This will be very useful in later releases of SQL Server 2008 to discover any changes from the currently supported mappings in RC0 ... Source : MSDN Blogs - Dan Jones - Blog Post
Scaling out Reporting Services
Technical notes on designing and implementing scale-out architecture for SQL Server Reporting Services (both 2005 and 2008) ... Source : SQLCat.com
SQL Server 2008 Security Whitepaper
This paper covers some of the most important security features in SQL Server 2008; Surface Area Config, SQL Agent Proxies, Execution Context, User/Schema Separation, Auditing, Encryption and more …. ... Source : Microsoft.com - Whitepaper
Trigger Finger
As Conor points out, Triggers are one of those very useful things that, if used for the wrong reasons in the wrong place, you'll end up shooting yourself in the foot (hence the name trigger?) ... Source : Conor Cunningham - SQLSkills.com - Blog Post