Ok, this could be partially off topic, but if you work on BI it is not. I will be a speaker at the Microsoft Sharepoint Conference 2008 in Milan (Italy) on 2 and 3 October 2008. I have one speech about building digital dashboards using SharePoint, Reporting  Read more

I just received a mail from Adam Machanic that pointed me to this bug (I would call it a performance issue) about the construction of SQL statements generated by the LINQ to SQL engine. The issue: every string passed as a constant in the query will be  Read more

Today I solved an issue for a customer that was a little bit unexpected, at least for me. The scenario: a table with a few records is periodically updated: a few records are inserted (with a bulk insert) and a few records are deleted (the older ones).  Read more

I just installed the Allocation Information add-in for SQL Server Management Studio . It’s very cool having this tool integrated into SSMS. It is a free add-in published on CodePlex. Take a look, it does worth the download in my opinion.  Read more

In the Programming Microsoft LINQ book we dedicated two whole chapters (76 pages) about the writing of a IQueryable LINQ provider: one is about expression trees and the other covers the several ways to extend LINQ, including the writing of an IQueryable  Read more

I’ve just read this interesting article from Anith Sen that lists many different ways to concatenate several row values into a single column (i.e. one row for each category with a field containing a comma separated list of products for that category).  Read more

Dinesh Kulkarni wrote an important post about changes in LINQ introduced by .NET 3.5 SP1 that has been released yesterday. One of the interesting changes is in the Cast<T> operator and its behavior is better described in this post by Ed Maurer.  Read more

A few months ago I talked about SQL Server Virtualization . For me, taking a look at virtualization improvements is very important, because I still think that not every database can be virtualized, but many of them probably yes! And the trend is that  Read more

<rant mode=”funny”> Most of the time I submitted an issue to Microsoft Connect, I got a “it’s by design” answer. I’ve been always irritated by this sentence because they don’t admit in this way that they have a bug. Today, I understood I’m wrong.  Read more

The last news is the acquisition of DATAllegro by Microsoft . From a server point of view, Microsoft is doing well (even if not fast as I’d like). But is on the client side that I (and many other customers) are disappointed. I totally agree with the post  Read more