Best Practices Analyzer for SQL Server 2005

Some good news on the SQL Server Relational Engine Manageability Team Blog. They have decided to start developing a Best Practices Analyzer for SQL Server 2005.

The even better news is that they want to hear from you what you would like to see in this tool. So visit their blog and post your comments!

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1

According to Euan Garden's blog Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2005 will be released this month!

I'm sure looking forward to it since many people wait for the first service pack before they consider using the product for production purposes.

SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Handbook

Check out this article on Technet giving you some insights in the upgrade process to SQL Server 2005.

Blank message box when starting SQL Server Management Studio

A couple of my colleagues were having a problem when starting Management Studio. Everytime the application started it would show a blank messagebox with just an OK button. Apparently this can be caused by installing the .NET Framework 1.1 (or one of it's updates) after the .NET Framework 2.0.









The SQL Server 2005 readme has the solution (although the problem description is not exactly the same - it seems to help in this case too):

1. In Control Panel, open Add or Remove Programs.
2. Click Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.
3. Click Change/Remove.
4. Click Repair, and then click Next.
5. When the repair is completed, restart the computer if you are prompted to do this

Random record CTE type thing

One of the developers asked me if it was possible to repeat a single query multiple times. He was trying to generate test data for stress testing and wanted to repeat a simple SELECT ID, NewID(). He told me Oracle could do it so I obviously had to prove that SQL Server was able to do this too :-)

Here is the solution I came up with, it's a little fun with CTEs and the RowNumber function.

WITH RepeatCTE (RowNumber, LogID)
AS
( SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY newID()) as RowNumber, newID() LogID UNION ALL
SELECT RowNumber + 1 as RowNumber, newID() LogID FROM RepeatCTE
)
SELECT TOP 400 * FROM RepeatCTE OPTION (MAXRECURSION 0);