I used all the nice keyboard shortcuts in Query analyser, and then they went and changed them for SSMS.

The father of a friend of mine was a taxidermist, (hobby- there aren't many professionals left in Britain) and so my first question to him was 'How many ways actually are there of skinning a cat?' He said that there was only one sensible way of doing it. Not a lot of people know this. Actually, although I'm a great cat enthusiast, there is a worrying plague of feral cats in Australia. It has caused the extinction of some species on islands and is thought to have contributed to the disappearance of many ground-dwelling birds and mammals on the mainland. There is quite a trade in Cat-Hats, I'm told, so maybe one of our Aussie friends can elucidate. (the phrase '... skin a cat' goes back to the 17th century)

It is surprising how much duplication there is in SQL Server in the whole area of WMI, Performance monitoring, DDL Triggers, DMV, alerts notifications and so on. This huge 'richness' in tokens, counters, variables and so on must add immensely to the task of testing. I dream of being invited to be a member of a sort of assassination squad within Microsoft that is dedicated to removing all the old discarded and under-used lumber from SQL Server, to slim the product to the minimum necessary. I'd nominate TEXT variables for the Death Squad. As I'm having quite a struggle with WMI Alerts at the moment, I might just give that the last cigarette and line it up against the wall.

Get rid of all the overhead that sucks in all the test effort and we might have more releases on time.