D-Blog

I have been reading about SQL Server 2008 for a while and today I got a glimpse of the various features and how it can help developers at the Victoria Dot Net users group meeting. Thanks to the special presentation by Chris Hewitt – “What should developers know about SQL Server 2008?”

A few days ago, I read about the new “File Stream” data type and my initial thoughts were how would I use this new feature and where would this be more usefull, later I realised that I could use the FileStreaming data type to store all the various CSV reports that I generate from our various applications. So effectively instead of storing it on a file server and putting in the reference in SQL, I could easily store the entire CSV file in to SQL Server and let it worry about where and how it stores it. More over I can also have all the report metadata in one location (sweet .

In the presentation Chris showed us a few examples on how we can send a Table as parameter to Stored Procedures and the new Merge Statement.  Well, frankly speaking it took me a few seconds to comprehend the huge benifits of sending in a table as a parameter to a stored procedure. The biggest benifit is the ability to insert large number of rows in one go by passing the data as a table parameter. Previously you could do that with temp tables but those tables were only specific to the stored procedure which creates them, however with this new feature we have some thing on the lines of Global Temp Tables. For more detailed explanation and examples, please refer this article

Coming to the Merge statement that’s another cool feature that has huge number of benefits. In scenarios where you need to to insert, update, or delete data based on certain conditions, programmers have to take care of the actions in the application, however with Merge statements we can do the insert, update or delete in one single statement based on the join conditions. For more information, please refer this article at BuilderAU.

Another cool feature is the Filtered Indexing. As the name suggests, all it means is that when we create Indexes for a table in SQL Server 2008 based on a particular criteria (simple where clause). I am very keen to test this on one our biggest tables (9 million rows and counting). At the moment  it takes quite a bit of time to query this table for certain criteria, I would love to do some bench marking on this table and see how efficient the Filtered Indexes are.

Finally a one more interesting feature is the ability to Debug Sql Statements in the same way as .NET code. Chris showed how we could debug any SQL statement or Stored procedure, and also the MS has finally introduced Intellisense for SQL statements. Allthough I have been told that 3rd party tools have been providing SQL intellisense for quite some time now.

For those of you who are interested in other features like Sparse, new DateTime formats, new Convert functionality etc, please refer SQL Server 2008 @ Microsoft.