Monthly Archives: March 2009

Xeon 5570 Benchmark Results From AnandTech

Posted on March 30, 2009 by Glenn Berry

AnandTech has a good benchmarking article up that shows the amazing performance of the Nehalem-based Xeon 5570 vs. the latest AMD server chips and several older Xeon chip families. For the SQL Server 2005 based benchmarks, the Xeon 5570 is … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Hardware | 14 Comments

SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advice

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Glenn Berry

While I was at the Denver SQL Server Users Group meeting last Thursday, I asked for a show of hands from the approximately 35 attendees, of people who were using SQL Server 2008 in a Production environment. I was a … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL Server 2008 | 8 Comments

Free Microsoft Exam Vouchers From DreamSpark

Posted on March 26, 2009 by Glenn Berry

Microsoft is now offering exam voucher codes through their DreamSpark program for college and high school students. This will allow students to take any Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) exam from Prometric for free. This is not a bad deal … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft Training | 6 Comments

SCOPE_IDENTITY vs. @@IDENTITY vs. IDENT_CURRENT in SQL Server 2008

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Glenn Berry

I have seen several SQL MVP bloggers posting about an open bug in Microsoft Connect where SCOPE_IDENTITY does not always return the correct result when query parallelism is involved with SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008. SCOPE_IDENTITY, @@IDENTITY, and … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL Server 2008 | 12 Comments

Good Benchmarks Comparing SSD to Traditional SAS and SATA Drives for SQL Server

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Glenn Berry

AnandTech (which is my favorite hardware review website) has a very interesting post up that compares performance between 15K SAS drives, 5400 SATA drives and Intel X25-E SLC SSD drives, using IOMeter and SQLIO, among other benchmarks. The gist of … Continue reading →

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Cumulative Update 4 For SQL Server 2008 Available

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Glenn Berry

Microsoft has released Cumulative Update 4 (CU4) for SQL Server 2008 RTM. You can request the update package here. This is build number 1798. One of the fixes included in CU4 is an issue that I reported (and got a … Continue reading →

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ETL World Record For SQL Server 2008

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Glenn Berry

Microsoft’s Len Wyatt, Tim Shea, and David Powell have new White Paper up on MSDN that details their successful effort to load 1 terabyte of data in less than 30 minutes using SSIS on SQL Server 2008, running on Windows … Continue reading →

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Benefits Of Windows Instant File Initialization For SQL Server 2005/2008

Posted on March 9, 2009 by Glenn Berry

Fellow MVP Tibor Karaszi has an interesting post up on SQLBlog.com outlining the benefits of Windows Instant File Initialization for SQL Server 2005 and above. I have blogged about this subject several times in the past, but Tibor has some … Continue reading →

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Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Glenn Berry

Back in November of 2008, Microsoft released an update to Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition (aka “Data Dude”), which added full support for SQL Server 2008. There is also valuable new functionality, such as extensible static code analysis … Continue reading →

Posted in Visual Studio 2008 | 1 Comment

Filtered Indexes in SQL Server 2008

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Glenn Berry

A new feature in SQL Server 2008 (which has not been well publicized) is filtered indexes. SQL Server Books Online (BOL) describes it this way: A filtered index is an optimized nonclustered index, suited for queries that select a small … Continue reading →

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