Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Awarded as MVP for the fourth time

I have been awarded as MVP for my extraordinary efforts in Windows Server System - BizTalk Server technical communities during the past year. This is my third year as BizTalk MVP.

Thanks for everybody who helped my achievement.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Attention: SQL Service Pack 2a is released

There has been an issue in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2. If you installed Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2, that you downloaded before March 05, 2007 and created or updated cleanup tasks in your maintenance plans, then you could encounter different runtimes, because SQL Server interpretes intervals wrong.

If you installed SQL Server Service Pack 2 on your system, then download the critical update and apply it on your SQL Server. After restarting the computer, SP2a is active. You must check your tasks' running intervals again.

If you haven't install SQL Server Service Pack 2 yet, then you could check the service pack 2 page and download the updated service pack 2 for your system.

For detailed info, look at the knowledge base item.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

New features in SQL Server SP2

SQL Server Service Pack 2 has been released. You can download it from here. You must also download updated books online from that page.

As I installed and reviewed the features, I have seen interesting new features which could change our database designs. Some of the features were necessary improvements.

Maintenace Plan Features
  • SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) is not required for executing maintenance plans. Database services handle execution.
  • You can define multiple schedules for the maintenance subplans.
  • Maintenance plans for multiple servers can be defined.
Database Engine Features
  • A new data type vardecimal has been provided for minimizing the disk space, needed to store existing decimal and numeric data types. By using this new data type, large amount of the disk space can be saved, if decimal or numeric columns with high precision used, but most values in that columns do not require many digits of precision.
Management Studio
  • Users can now integrate their own custom management reports into Management Studio.
You can read more information about the new features in the SQL Server 2005 SP2 from here.