Positively SQL

Today Mladen Prajdic  posted a on Twitter a SQL statement that captured my attention: (http://twitter.com/MladenPrajdic/status/9878219727)

SELECT
CONVERT(varchar(50), N’æøåáäĺćçčéđńőöřůýţžš’)
COLLATE Cyrillic_General_CI_AI
returns aoaaalcccednooruytzs

If you notice the conversion to Cyrillic_General_CI_AI collation his shows an interesting mechanism for code page translation that we could not explain:
Why does Cyrillic_General_CI_AI or   Greek_CI_AI collation successfully convert accents to their base ascii chars?
 I found an answer [...]

After attending a presentation on SQL Azure by Microsoft’s George Huey an interesting topic came to my mind in regards to the actual use for a cloud based database that has over 1400 incompatibilities with SQL Server: What’s the use for this since it is not a viable alternative to a production database.
I would say [...]

Recently Paul Randal (aka Mr. Tripp)  started a web version of the tag game in the SQL Server blogging community  on what were the three most important events that shaped your career and got you to this point in your life. It is a very difficult question because unlike data, life events do not accept [...]

As requested by Yavor Angelov from MSFT via Twitter im writing down what seem to to be my biggest pains with QO in SqlServer.
1)
Whenever you have a a join between large tables QO will look at the indexes that exists on the join keys. If some indexes are missing it seems that the default join [...]

Recently I answered a question on how to automate a task that runs a DTS package, encrypts the result with PGP and then transfers the encrypted file to a FTP site. I became interested in this subject since I heard the same request from 2 people in less than a month and realized that this is a standard pattern for a business process. Extract.Encrypt.Transfer

I’m heading home from the August session of Chicago PASS and SSUG meeting.
First off, this was the biggest meeting in Chicago. Over 80 people signed up and for a very good reason.
After a very interesting Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administration with Windows PowerShell presentation by The MAK and Yan Pan,  Allan Hirt managed to cram [...]

I recently saw the worst example of  how not to designa table and indexes in SQL Server.
So here it is:
Table1(UserID,ActivityID,ActivityType,AddDate)
Role : Log any activity that a user is invited for.
PrimaryKey: … Wait for it … tada : UserID,ActivityID,ActivityType,AddDate … Wait you say …. YES … all table columns are used for the primary key and [...]

Paul Randal wrote a very good answer on DB fragmentation here:
http://serverfault.com/questions/8234/how-can-i-tell-when-it-is-time-to-defrag-my-sqlserver-database
Some things any DBA should know.

I posted a comment on Kevin Kline’s blog regarding:

Microsoft Marketing Throws SQL Server Under the Bus

“A spokesperson for Microsoft said that the problem was not bandwidth but that its SQL Server database had reached excessive fragmentation levels caused by the tremendous surge of queries”.  Read about it here:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/102445,windows-7-rc-download-crashes.aspx

and also here:
[...]