Day 2 of TechEd
Day 2 from TechEd, this time from Brian Knight's perspective as the SQLServerCentral.com crew enjoys a week of learning and sun at the 2005 conference.
Help Us Out For A Free Gift
We would like to offer a free copy of the May 2004 SQL Server Standard magazine to everyone who can take a couple minutes to update some demographics for us.
Meet the SQL Server Team
They have been very hard at work trying to get SQL Server 2005 ready for release, but many of them have been given a week's break after IDW15 to come down to TechEd. They've created an interesting diary that you can view.
Enumerate SQL Server Names from "SQL Server Enterprise Manager"
Occasionally, SQL Server database administrators are requested to provide a list of development SQL Servers, production SQL Servers and so on. Many articles, such as "Monitor Disk Space on Multiple SQL Servers" and "Inventorying hardware and OS information on all SQL Servers" require a list of servers in a text file.
Day 1 at TechEd
It's not a SQL Server event, but SQL Server is a large part of it. TechEd is a huge conference and one of the premier events put on by Microsoft each year. Read about the first day with Andy, Brian, and Steve.
SQL Server 2005 System Tables and Views
When a SQL Server object is created, its properties are called metadata. The metadata is stored in special System Tables. For example, in SQL 2000, when a new column was created, the column name and data type could be found in an internal System Table called syscolumns. All SQL objects produce metadata. Every time SQL 2000 Enterprise Manager or SQL 2005 SQL Server Management Studio is browsed, the information displayed about database, tables, and all objects, comes from this metadata.
Suggestions for Datatypes
SQL Server 2000 does a lot of things for the DBA, tuning, updating statistics, scheduling tasks, wizards and more. But one thing that it does not help with is choosing the correct data type for your data. New author Amit Lohia brings us a technique and some code that will examine your existing data and suggest places where another data type might be a better choice.
Using ANSI SQL as a Conceptual Hierarchical Data Modeling
This paper will explain and show how standard ANSI SQL processors can naturally model and automatically process complex multi-leg hierarchical data structures at a full conceptual hierarchical level. This also means the query user does not need to have structure knowledge of the hierarchical structures involved. The data modeling capability includes dynamically combining logical hierarchical relational and physical XML data structures at a full hierarchical level. This also includes the ability to link below the root of the lower level structure intuitively forming a valid unified hierarchical structure. As will be shown, ANSI SQL’s high level hierarchical data processing allows the flexible conceptual control of hierarchical node promotion, fragment processing, structure transformation, and variable structure creation.
Disappearing DBAs
In response to an article the Brian Knight write on the death of the production DBA, Sean McCown writes about the role that DBAs may play in shops that upgrade to Yukon (SQL Server 2005).
Blogs
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
Forums
Multiple Deployment Processes
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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Upgrading Admin Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries
Question of the Day
Upgrading Admin Queries
I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
See possible answers