If you have been working with Sybase IQ then you might be familiar with what a columnstore database is. SQL Server has added a new type of index which is column based instead of row based, this is the columnstore index. I will create another post this week that will show you how to create such an index, right now I will only show you the difference between a query against a regular index and against a columnstore index, this way you can get an idea of the performance difference.

SQL Server Denali CTP3 has added a bunch of date/time functions. In the A Quick look at the new EOMONTH function in SQL Server Denali CTP3 post I have already looked at the EOMONTH function. In this post I want to take a look at the DATEFROMPARTS and DATETIMEFROMPARTS functions DATEFROMPARTS If you are a .NET programmer then you probably know that you can construct a date by passing a bunch of integers to the DateTime constructor. To create a date of July, 13, 2011 you would do something like this

SQL Server Denali CTP3 has a bunch of new date/time functions like DATEFROMPARTS, DATETIMEFROMPARTS and EOMONTH First let’s take a look at EOMONTH. The syntax for EOMONTH is EOMONTH ( start_date [, month_to_add ] ) If you pass in getdate() you will get the last day of the month for the current month SELECT EOMONTH(getdate()) 2011-07-31 00:00:00.000 If you pass in a date, you will also get the last date for that month

Denali CTP3 comes with the IIF function, if you have used VB or Excel then you already know how this function works. In essence this function is a shorter version of a CASE statement. The syntax is as follows IIF ( boolean_expression, true_value, false_value ) So instead of this SELECT CASE WHEN 1 = 2 THEN 'equal' ELSE 'not equal' END AS Comp We can do this SELECT IIF(1=2,'equal','not equal') as Comp Both of those will return not equal Be aware that you can’t use NULL like in the example below

SQL Server Code Name “Denali” CTP3 is available for download. You can get it here: https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/pd/SQLDCTP3CTA/enus/default.aspx There are a bunch of new things in this CTP, Apollo (column store indexes), some new date functions, new parse functions and more goodies Be advised that you need Internet Explorer to download CTP3, it requires the Download Manager which is invoked via an ActiveX control. I could not get the download to work with Chrome

Here we go again! It’s T-SQL Tuesday #20 – a monthly blog party, this time hosted by Amit Banerjee. (Thanks Amit!) This month, we’re talking about “T-SQL Best Practices”. I used to write a lot more T-SQL than I do now. I had lots of rules for how T-SQL was written in my shop. But rather than sharing that extensive document, today I want to share with you my top three pieces of T-SQL advice.

Most companies reach a point in their lives when they realize that they aren’t entirely sure what IT resources they have, how they’re deployed, what direction they’re headed, or whether they’re ready for the next big shift from the business. Some companies visit this point multiple times, either in response to shifts in the company or business landscape or as a result of letting the environment devolve back into it’s primordial beginnings.

Or should that have said Open source and I? I was thinking about the whole open source thing and my role in it. It is true that use and abuse a fair number of open source projects and I blogged about a lot of them in the past. I have however never contributed to any of them in a big way. I might have sent a few request for improvement and sent a few bugreports. I even once wrote an automocker for NSubstitute for Structuremap which I don’t think ever made it in to the code. But I don’t think any of those things I did made much impact on those projects or on me. I even made an attempt at improving the proxy support for nuget but got fairly quickly frustrated with how things were done.

Yesterday I had a little discussion with Jon skeet on twitter about the News of the world incident. @jonskeet: I’m hearing a lot about journalists behaving immorally, but nothing about the apparent lack of security of phone systems. Odd. @chrissie1: so you would partially blame the shop owner if his stuff gets stolen? @jonskeet: To put it another way: if someone took advantage of an ISP vulnerability to read your email, wouldn’t you be furious with the ISP

So I’ve been working on a practice site using WebMatrix. The basic premise was that I would create a site that had some similar functionality to Delicious to help me track the various articles, podcasts, books, and so on. This would also give me something practical to work on as I try to get a handle on this whole WebMatrix thing. So here’s a couple tips, tricks, and the occasional slip in the mud I picked up along the way.