I feel like I keep finding reasons to use SQL Server 2008 Management Studio with SQL 2005 instances, and here's another - the COPY_ONLY option now appears on the Backup dialog box (others include the DROP & CREATE scripting option, multi-server queries and the Select Top 1000 Rows menu entry). It's not a new option (it just ...

The hairy Irishman (his description - I just call him Sacha) is presenting to the Adelaide SQL Server User Group today, talking about improvements in SQL Server 2008 Integration Services. Right now he's talking about the No Match output of the Lookup Component, and I'm wondering why I had always just accepted that in SQL 2005, rows that ...

It's nice to give Microsoft feedback and get the product changed! I first mentioned this in a post last month and logged a connect.microsoft.com entry. Microsoft checked it out, invesigtaed, and have now put a new property into SQL Server 2008 to resolve it! They write: Thanks a lot for your feedback. We are taking a look at this ...

This is really quite cool, especially since it's a tool feature, and one that will help SQL Server 2005 installs. Suppose you have many servers, all registered in Management Studio, in the Registered Servers window. Now you can right-click on the Local Server Group, and pick the "New Query" option. Write a query, and it gives you a ...

Installing SQL Server 2008 gives you SQLPS.exe, an application you can run which is a PowerShell including the PSDrives for SQL Server (and compatible with SQL Server 2005 as well!). But how do you make this work with your current copy of PowerShell? Well, I just worked this out. Darren Gosbell was lamenting with me about the fact that it's ...

I've written before that SQL Server 2008 (February CTP) gives you SQLPS - a PowerShell interface to SQL Server. So I was trying to get the ScriptingOptions happening, and this is the only way I've found so far. It's ugly, and if you have a better way of doing this, please post a comment for me. ...

SQL Server 2008 has spatial types which are very useful for all kinds of applications. I thought it would be nice to produce one of those charts like you get in maps, telling you the distance between cities. So I start by populating the data. This uses the geography data type, which understands about the spherical nature of the world. The data is ...