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

Eric White has written an interesting post titled “Are developers using LINQ?” – there are interesting considerations about the adoption of functional programming too, but the most interesting part for me is the list of comment of the post. A lot of people  Read more

I would like to attend to SQLBits this year, but my agenda is already overbooked. I hope you have the time to attend because there are a lot of interesting sessions , it’s a good excuse to visit London (the conference is scheduled on September 13, 2008  Read more

Mosha released a new version of MDX Studio (0.4) , which offers an “MDX Analysis” function that suggest best practices for a given MDX query. I tried the tool with some MDX query and it offers very good suggestion (when possible with link to further information  Read more

Thanks to a comment sent by a reader of my M2M paper , I just found a possible bug (or ” not supported by design feature”) of the CREATE LOCAL CUBE mdx statement. In short, it seems that a simple many-to-many dimension relationship is supported, but if  Read more

Two sample chapters of my Programming Microsoft LINQ book are finally available. Links to download pages in the chapters title. Chapter 6 – Tools for LINQ to SQL In this chapter, we took a look at the tools that are available to generate LINQ to SQL entities  Read more