Ginneblog

New productivity tools included with SQL Server 2008, along with those from third parties, make dealing with the database (and application development in general) much easier.

It was standing room only last Wednesday night at the San Francisco SQL Server User Group Meeting.  Joel Champagne, Principal Consultant at Magenic, was on hand to show us some of his favorite SQL Server 2008 features, and to suggest better ways to accomplish many of the tasks SQL Server Developers and DBAs perform frequently in the course of their work.  You can view the slide presentation here.

The first part of Joel’s talk focused on programmability features in SQL 2008, along with some practical examples of their use.  His favorite 2008 features are MERGE/Table-valued parameters, Geography UDTs, and SSRS with Report Builder 2.0.  He included source code demos for each of these aspects of SQL Server 2008.

SQL Server 2008 Programmability Features

• Table-valued parameters
• MERGE statement
• Geography UDT
• SSRS 2008, with a focus on Report Builder 2.0

Next Joel gave a fast-paced demo of a 3rd party tool he’s been developing called SQL-Hero.  He hates having to do the same things over and over again so he developed a toolset to help him in his everyday development tasks.  It’s evolved over several years into a 0.9 version of a commercial product.

Joel Champagne demos SQL-Hero

Features of SQL-Hero include an Advanced SQL editor, schema change tracking, text comparison, enhanced SQL monitoring, a notification engine, performance testing, a code generator, and more.  SQL-Hero works with SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008, including Express Editions.

You can learn more and download the current version of SQL-Hero for free at Joel’s website, www.codexframework.com/SQLHero/Default.aspx.  There’s clearly a lot of value packed into his tool, and it’s definitely worth a look.

Popularity: unranked [?]

 Send to Twitter