Today at PASS the SQL Server team has publicly announced the first Community Technology Preview of the next version of SQL Server code named Denali. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6a04f16f-f6be-4f92…

With SQL Server Denali CTP1 come 20 new dynamic management views, this brings the total number of dynamic management views to 155 Here is a list of the new dynamic management views, included is also the type of the dynamic management view…

If you have a stored procedure which returns two result sets up till now there was now way to get the meta data easily about the first result set. Let's take a look what is new in SQL Server Denali, first create this very simple stored procedure. cre…

If you already have a SQL Server 2008 or a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance then do not install SQL Server Denali as a named instance. If you do so then your current SSIS development environment will be broken. There is a reason there are virtual machines, I…

With every version of SQL Server come warnings about features/code that is deprecated. You can use the sys.dm_os_performance_counters dynamic management view to find what these deprecated features are. If you run the following query on SQL Server De…

SQL Server Denali makes it much easier to do paging compared to previous versions of SQL Server. In SQL Server 2005 or 2008 you would do something like the following to skip the first 50 rows WITH cte AS (SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY number) AS…

Debugging has been improved in SQL Server Denali, here is a quick video that shows you how you can set a break point hit count and then while debugging it will stop when it hits that value. Of course stuff like this has been around forever in Visual Studio, I am glad that it now is also available in SSMS

If you are installing SQL Server Denali CTP 1 on a computer which already has SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2 installed, please read: Don’t install Denali BIDS side by side with a 2008 instance. For CTP 1 BIDS is still based on VS 2008 once they switch to 2010 this won't be a problem.

The first thing you will notice is that the icons are new, here is just a simple package that shows some of these icons

People have been asking for sequences for a very long time and now finally it is included with SQL Server Denali CTP 1. You don't have to muck around with an identity table that you share across many tables anymore.

A simple sequence will look like this

The SQL Server Management Studio that ships with SQL Server Denali CTP1 is based on the Visual Studio 2010 shell. One of the advantages you will see right away is that if you have multiple monitors you can drag a query window to another monitor. This is…