Uninstalling CTP

Want to get rid of previous CTP installations easily?
Check out this post. The VS 2005 Diagnostic and Uninstall Tool does the sometimes difficult task for you!

Override isolation level

When setting the transaction isolation level it could be nice to be able to control this on table level regardless of the level specified. SQL Server supports this by adding a WITH in the FROM clause.

Eg.

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SERIALIZABLE

SELECT Field FROM table t1
INNER JOIN table2 t2 WITH (READUNCOMMITTED) ON t1.ID = t2.ID

This would cause serializable locks on t1 and read uncommitted on t2.

String Summary Statistics

I found this little interesting information in this article

SQL Server 2005 includes patented technology for estimating the selectivity of LIKE conditions. It builds a statistical summary of substring frequency distribution for character columns (a string summary). This includes columns of type text, ntext, char, varchar, and nvarchar. Using the string summary, SQL Server can accurately estimate the selectivity of LIKE conditions where the pattern may have any number of wildcards in any combination. For example, SQL Server can estimate the selectivity of predicates of the following form:

Column LIKE 'string%'
Column LIKE '%string'
Column LIKE '%string%'
Column LIKE 'string'
Column LIKE 'str_ing'
Column LIKE 'str[abc]ing'
Column LIKE '%abc%xy'

If there is a user-specified escape character in a LIKE pattern (i.e., the pattern is of the form LIKE pattern ESCAPE escape_character), then SQL Server 2005 guesses selectivity. This is an improvement over SQL Server 2000, which uses a guess for selectivity when any wildcard other than a trailing wildcard % is used in the LIKE pattern, and has limited accuracy in its estimates in that case. The String Index field in the first row set returned by DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS includes the value YES if the statistics object also includes a string summary. The contents of the string summary are not shown. The string summary includes additional information beyond what is shown in the histogram. For strings longer than 80 characters, the first and last 40 characters are extracted from the string and concatenated prior to considering the string in the creation of the string summary. Hence, accurate frequency estimates for substrings that appear only in the ignored portion of a string are not available.

MySQL

I've been playing with MySQL for a project of a friend of mine (http://www.yawn.be).
I honestly love SQL Server even more now :-) I don't want to talk bad about MySQL itself because I don't know enough about the product to do so. But the tools provided are really sad as opposed to the tools that are included with SQL Server. I just wanted to know the queries that were run and their io, cpu, duration etc (<3 Profiler<3) but apparently there is no way with the standard tools to determine this. Graphical Query plans or even plans like the Text Query Plans in SQL Server... couldn't find it :-(