Kev's Life

Microsoft has updated there SQL Books Online (BOL)

You will get it with the update service or download from Microsoft

I found a very nice SQL article by Susan Harkins giving 10 tips for the beginner in SQL

Among the questions answered are:-

• Working with Jet SQL in the Access SQL window
• Words reserved by SQL
• The difference between ALL, DISTINCT and DISTINCTROW

To read the full blog entry go to

Excelent artical about not shrinking MSSQL database data files. on sqlskills

Now, don’t confuse shrinking the transaction log with shrinking data files. Shrinking the log is necessary if your log has grown out of control, or as part of a process to remove excessive VLF fragmentation (see Kimberly’s excellent posts on this here and here). However, shrinking the log should be a rare operation and should not be part of any regular maintenance you perform.

Here are Kev’s links for today

Maintaining high availability of SQL virtual machine

Danielle Ruest and Nelson Ruest, Contributors

Since the release of Hyper-V, Microsoft has continued its commitment to server virtualization by releasing new software products that are optimized for just that. This is the case for SQL Server 2008 among other Microsoft products.

Read More on SQL Server Search

Capturing I/O patterns using Process Monitor
By Edward Elliott,

The single most expensive native operation SQL Server can perform is reading and writing to the disk. While SSD drives have been hailed as the future and fault tolerant ram drives are prohibitively expensive, most of us still use the humble mechanical disk drive to store and retrieve data. Understanding SQL’s I/O patterns can help you design your disk infrastructure and knowing your application’s patterns can help you get the most out of your disks.

In this article I will be show how to measure the quantity and size of I/O requests in each database as well as being able to work out where your I/O’s are hitting and then matching those up with physical tables. To do this we can use the free “Process Monitor” tool and then load the output into SQL Server.

Read more on sqlservercentral

I Found a great project on CodePlex last week. giving a summary of all new SSIS projects this is a great resource for anyone using SSIS

Project Description This is a community project for developing additional tasks and components for SSIS, and identifying other CodePlex projects that do the same. 34 Connection Managers, Tasks, and Components exist on CodePlex – find them here.

http://ssisctc.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Home