Wanted to thanks Simon for putting together a great event last night.  It was a real pleasure to be in the company of some of the greats(Itzik, Greg, Davide, Bill and not forgetting Mr Sabin) in the SQL server space.  The venue was superb and the knowledge of the panel covered pretty much every corner of the SQL Server platform. 

I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the social evenings progress.  It's going to be hard to follow this one. 

Yesterday we had a problem with connecting to ReportManager on our Report Server.  The machine is running Windows 2008 x64 Enterprise  and SQL Server 2008 x64 Enterprise.  Connecting to ReportManager from our machines (running Windows 2003 Standard) was fine, we could manage the reports and DS's etc. 

Been a while since my first post and slowly getting back into the real-world.  Having spent the past few months busy at work with the SQL Server 2005 Migration and at home with the second child on the way. 

Microsoft having released SP2 CTP last week I have only just managed to download it and read the readme.  The vardecimal storage looks of good interest and will be having a little play in the next couple of weeks, after seeing a post from Benjamin Jones on the subject. 

I also received my copy of Kalen Delaney's book on the Storage Engine which I've been trying to get my hands on since I heard about it earlier in the year.  Trying to read as much as I can on the 50 minute commute I have.  It is certainly wetting my appetite for the follow-up book on tuning and optimization. 

Back to the migration, having had a copy of our apps on 2005 for quite some time and having it fully tested by our testers, we are finally getting down to D-day for the live migration.  Overall, we have seen great improvments.  Finally getting rid of the XDR's and XSD's and using the FOR XML PATH functionality, has improved queries taking 20 seconds with the XSD's down to 1-2 seconds with the FOR XML PATH queries.  

Anyway, going to be another full week next week for me, testing my migration process 2 or 3 times before going live next Saturday. 

Having a busy time at home at the moment trying to get a bathroom and 2 bedrooms fully re-decorated by January before our second child arrives.  So I've got my work cut out.  On a good note we had one of those 4D scans done a few weeks ago now and would fully recommend it to anyone and after they told me that the software they use was written by Pixar bought the geek out in me.  We are also taking our daughter to have breakfast with Santa just before Christmas at Hamley's.  But I think it's more for my benefit. 

Enough rummaging for one night.  I'm going to go and watch me some Beverley Hills Cop.

SteveP

Thought I'd get by blog going by giving some praise to Visual Studio for Database Professionals.  Having downloaded CTP3 last week I've been trying to throw some time into seeing if it can fill the gap we have all been craving for. 

Knowing full well this is a very early release I expected there would be some bugs.  But in small chunks it seems to work ok.  In regards to importing a schema, I tried this with a Northwind DB and seemed to be fine.  But I then tried one of our Dev DB's with 1200 objects and it seemed to chug along well until I started to look at the tables in the Solution Explorer.  Drilling into a table I then wanted to look at the columns in the table but there was nothing. 

On the plus side I could still get the scripts out and use them.  Also, the Data Compare tool works well and came in very usefull this week in reversing some changes back to a few rows. 

To finish off I listened to the latest installment of DNR last night that was recorded live from TechNet on the above mentioned subject.  Well worth a listen on what Kurt and team have planned for the product. 

Over and out

Steve