SqlClrProject version 2.6 Released

I have just released a new version - 2.6 - of the deployment tool for SQLCLR assemblies. It is a minor release, but it implements some changes that are fundamental for coming versions and also fixes a couple of minor bugs.

The download page for it is here, and if you want general information about what the SqlClr project is, you should go here.

SQL Server 2008 February CTP Available

Euan posted late yesterday evening that SQL Server 2008 February CTP (CTP 6) has been released. Grab it from here (one of the pages are dated November 2007, but the link will take you to the correct download).

Update of SQLCLRProject

I’ve had some feed-back about SQLCLRProject (thanks Doug et al!), and based on that fixed some issues.

Read all about it, and get the updates on the download page.

As always, comments and suggestions for improvements are very welcome!!

Niels

Like Phoenix Rising … or New Version of SQLCLRProject

Hi everyone, it’s been a while (shame one me!)!!

As some of you may know, back in the days I developed a tool for deploying .NET assemblies to SQL Server 2005 (or, as it was called then, Yukon). Initially it was just a tool used from the command line. As time went by, it evolved into a project named SQLCLRProject, consisting of the command line tool (YukonDeploy), a stand-alone front-end GUI, DeployProperties, and an add-in (with project and item-templates) for Visual Studio, DeployAddIn.

The latest release of SQLCLRProject was back in February 2006 (wow, that was a long time ago ) , and up until a month or so, nothing much was done to it. I used it whenever I did any SQLCLR work and I know other developers were using it as well. Anyway, a while back I started receiving emails from people wondering if I could fix some “undocumented features” and/or implement some new features.

So, I decided to resurrect the project and the last weeks I have been working on fixing the issues and adding some more features. I’m fairly happy with it as it is right now, and today I release version 2.5. The download page for it is here.

So what has been done:

• The project has now it’s own web-pages, so I have a place to point people to when explaining what SQLCLRProject is.
  • main page
  • download page.
• The Visual Studio add-in (and templates) supports both VS 2005 as well as VS 2008
• The VS add-in (as well as the other tools) supports both SQL Server 2005 as well as SQL Server 2008 (Katmai).
• The previous version of the tool allowed you to re-deploy a UDT without manually dropping tables with columns based on the UDT. The tool either dropped the whole table or just the column (based on a configurable setting), before re-deploying. In this version the choice is as before to either to drop the whole table or the column. However if choosing to drop the column:
  • first the table is altered and a new column is added (varchar(max) or varbinary(max) - also based on a configurable setting),
  • then the data from the original column is copied over to the new column
  • finally the original column is dropped.
• In T-SQL we have the notion of procedure parameters with default values. In .NET we don’t have anything similar (well, VB.NET has optional parameters, but that is a compiler hack). The tool now allows you to, by using an attribute, defining parameters in your .NET code that will be created as T-SQL object with default values.
• Fixed a bug where the add-in for VS could not handle project with white spaces in the path.

So, if you are interested, go to here to read more about SQLCLRProject and if you want to download; the download page is here.

Comments etc are always welcome, post a comment here (or on the main page) or drop me an email.

Niels

SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) June CTP Released

So during Tech-Ed Microsoft released with very little hoopla the first public CTP of the next version of SQL Server. It goes under the code name Katmai, but will most likely be called SQL Server 2008.

After a lot of hassle I finally managed to install it last evening in a Windows 2003 Server Virtual Machine, so Ihaven’t had much time to look at it. However, one thing I saw was that it now supports table like structures as input parameters to stored procs - wohoo!!!!!

Tomorrow I’m off to Boston to teach a gig there, hopefully I’ll have time during the flight to have a more thorough look of this new version. I’ll report back anything interesting I see.

Pat Helland is Back

Welcome back, Pat!!

SQL Server 2005 and DMV’s

One of the first thing I usually do after having installed a new version of SQL Server is to snoop around at the system tables to see what new tables there are and what they can give me information about.

As you may know by now, in SQL Server 2005 the system tables are not longer visible. The information from the system tables are instead exposed as Dynamic Management Views (DMV). These DMV’s gives you a lot of information about the state of your SQL Server, the problem is how to interpret the view’s and what view’s to look at when you try to solve a specific problem.

Fortunately Slava Ok from Microsoft is planning to post a series of blog entries about DMV’s where he emphasizes on what actual problems the DMV’s can be used to solve. The first installment is now up, and you can find it here. Happy reading!!

Rebooting the Blog

I’ve been blogging on and off (mosly off) for a couple of years now, and blogging has been trying to quit smoking - but the opposite: you keep it up (blogging) for a while but then you fall back into the old habits (not blogging).

I have decided to give it a final go; I’ll try to blog with some frequency, if I can not do that for a sustained period I have told myself to give it up totally. In conjunction with trying to get back to blogging I have also decided to move from a blog hosted on my staff web site at DevelopMentor to a wordpress.com hosted blog.

In this blog I’ll cover (as before) topics regarding databases (SQL Server in general), data access technologies (ADO.NET, LINQ etc). As I have recently switched to Mac and OSX I may also write about the experiences switching to Mac after having been a Windows user for a looooooong time.

I’ll try and do a re-direction of the feed from my DM blog to the feed here, but I can not guarantee that I will succeed in doing that.