Sql Documentation

The topic of a recent discussion, Doc-To-Help appears to be a documentation authoring tool. It does NOT appear to be a documentation generating tool. For documentation of .NET assemblies Doc-To-Help will take the output of Microsoft’s Sandcastle and add formatting, TOC’s, etc. As a quick reminder… “Sandcastle produces accurate, MSDN style, comprehensive documentation by reflecting [...]

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“Too many table names in the query.” ADO.NET Data Services

Another day, another Data Services issue. This time the error message was “Too many table names in the query. The maximum allowable is 256.” Turns out this is caused by my organization’s use of Sql Server 2005 rather than Sql Server 2008. Unfortunately, it’s not very feasible to reduce the number of tables being used [...]

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Sequential GUID’s – 50% Performance Difference?

While listening to another .NET Rocks podcast this morning I caught mention of Sequential GUID’s, a feature introduced in Sql Server 2005. Given the use of GUID’s as primary keys I thought this a useful piece of information.
What are the performance improvement of Sequential Guid over standard Guid? – Stack Overflow.

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Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition

Like most applications, a database plays a critical role in what I’m working on. Fortunately, two higher-end versions of Visual Studio are supposed to provide a Microsoft security blanket for developing a database, managing and tracking changes to a database, and deploying those changes. (Among other things)
http://www.vitalygorn.com/blog/post/2008/01/Handling-Database-easily-with-Visual-Studio-2008.aspx
Unfortunately, Microsoft left the security blanket for getting these [...]

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VSTS: DB Best Practices : Right sizing the master.dbschema file for better design time performance

A reference to the master.dbschema (or similar, see below!) is necessary for database projects in Visual Studio that reference system objects. Here’s how to add those objects without slowing everything down.
In the March edition of MSDN we provided an overview of Server Projects and how to reference the master.dbschema file to resolve references to system [...]

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Configuring the Windows Firewall to Allow SQL Server Access

I spent an embarrassingly long period of time trouble-shooting my Sql Server install only to find the problem was the Windows Firewall.
Firewall systems help prevent unauthorized access to computer resources. If a firewall is turned on but not correctly configured, attempts to connect to SQL Server might be blocked.
To access an instance of the SQL [...]

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How to identify your SQL Server version and edition

This article describes how to identify your current Microsoft SQL Server version number and the corresponding product or service pack level. It also describes how to identify the specific edition if you are using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.
via How to identify your SQL Server version and edition.

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Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Aha! One of my complaints about the Microsoft development platform is that there’s no Windows Update equivalent for keeping track of the myriad of patches, updates, and new versions. Looks like somebody at Microsoft had the same idea and came up with a “Google Pack” of free web-related technologies. Hopefully the installer gracefully handles the [...]

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xSQL Profiler – Free Sql Server Profiler

One of my biggest complaints about the Express versions of Sql Server is that Sql Profiler is specifically excluded, a full Sql Server license is required instead. I managed to do without Sql Profiler just fine until I was working on some Entity Framework code and wanted the see the sql getting generated. It certainly [...]

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