I was following a debate on the new Merge syntax in SQL Server 2008 with interest. It was somewhat of a debate about hot things should work, what happens with NULLs, etc. Now I don't want to recreate it here, but one thing was interesting to me. What would you… Read more

 I went down to the  Denver stop on the Heros Happen Here launch events and as you can tell by this post, I left early. The IT Pro section was in the am and the developer section in the afternoon, but I grew a little tired of the developer keynote… Read more

I'm starting to see results from other people testing compression and it seems that the data compression can really provide some nice benefits. I did minimal testing since I don't have any great, large databases and I'd have to create a load, which I didn't want to do. However some… Read more

 Oneof my tasks for our mini-Summit for Red Gate was to show the crew how I do the podcasts. There were fiveof us there and the hope is that at some point 2 or 3 of us can do video, so since I had the most experience, I brought along… Read more

 I'm not a bg fan of long meetings. I used to try and plan an hour a week staff meeting for my group, and then desparately try to cover everything in 30 minutes, take some questions, and then get everyone out of there. I hated being in 2-3 hour meetings… Read more

 SQL Server 2008 brings with is a new set of features involving compression. At first I was assuming this was only backup compression, but as I've been digging in, there is a lot more to it. In fact, there are actually quite a few types of compression. We have: 

• Backup…

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