Heh... you already know the answer to this, Steve... flash and time to market drive everything. No time to think about such useful things... there's a shedule to meet! 😉

What would be even better is a defrag "crawler" that operated in the background, constantly seeking the biggest bang for the buck to defrag because the server already knows what the longest running queries are and, therefor, which indexes are used and need to be kept sparkling. Spare clock cycles would be used in a manner similar to DiskKeeper's disk defragger. When the big bang items are taken care of, then it would move on to less items. A couple of parameterized settings would allow it to be tweaked.

Of course, DBA's don't have to write squat to do this... all they have to do is lookup DBCC SHOWCONTIG and there's code already written for them. It's not a crawler, but it does get the job done. If the database is properly maintained, there's hardly ever a need to invoke a defrag or index rebuild manually. If there is the need, typing a simple DBCC command is almost as fast as finding the table, right clicking on it, and selecting something like "Defrag me now".

I agree... some of the little things are very important... Like the idea of deprecating the very useful SELECT ColumnAlias = ColumnName... what the hell is up with that? Why don't they leave that alone? Seems like they actually have to go out of their way to get rid of that. And it's VERY useful... it's one of the easiest ways to write a SELECT to test for what will be returned before turning it into an UPDATE which uses the SET ColumnName = x.ColumnName format.

And why did they get rid of the very usefile xp_getfiledetails extended stored procedure? They should have expanded on it's use!!!

You're right... the little things matter... these little things, and more, have been very useful and it would have been such a little thing to just leave them the hell alone! Then to do like they did in 2k5 and not have the simplicity of pressing F4 to find something... or being able to press Ctrl-Shift-C to comment out blocks of lines without having to shift to the 2k keyboard. Removing these incredibly useful things is "useful" or "improved"? They must want people to buy Toad or AQT... :hehe:

In case you couldn't tell, you've kinda hit a sore spot with me about Microsoft and the little things they've removed. What's next? Removing the FROM clause from UPDATE, being able to overload a variable in a single Select, or maybe remove the ability to SET @variable = column = expression in the UPDATE statement just because they aren't ANSI??? They've gotta stop messing with the little things before they start thinking of new little things.