Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals

You have probably read on blogs everywhere that Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals has been released (check out GertD's Blog). The download will be available on MSDN any day now. Do note that Visual Studio Team Suite is required (of which a free trial can be downloaded).

Unlike my love for ISQLw over Management Studio I do feel VSTE for DBPros was a missing piece from our toolkit. It finally brings some features our way that have been around for a long time for .NET developers like Unit Testing, Refactoring, Team Foundation Server integration, ...

Another nice feature is "Data Generator". Random data can be easily generated (even based on regular expressions) and can be configured to take into account the ratio between related tables.

Ad hoc queries take a longer time to finish running when the size of the TokenAndPermUserStore cache grows in SQL Server 2005

This seems to be the official description of the bug we ran into on our cloudy day :-(

Check out the KB article here

We are carefully playing around with new SQL Server 2005 features however since we are planning to go for it again in Q1 2007.

- Database mirroring
- Database snapshots
- Analysis services

Very exciting stuff! If I run into obscure behavior you will read about it.

The first one would be to beware of snapshots and statistics, remember that snapshots are read only so when you query a snapshot the statistics should exist (and be up-to-date) in the source database when the snapshot is created or your query plans may not be as optimal as you like ;-) It's pure logic but something to remember!