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WolframAlpha is a new online initiative from the company who created Mathematica. As the blog states it is not just a place to look up facts. Under the covers it uses Mathematica’s inbuilt algorithms:

For example, if you give WolframAlpha a mathematical formula, a polynomial say, or something involving sines and cosines, it will give you back a number of useful results: a graph of the function, a list of its zeros, factored and expanded forms, etc.

Try this one: integral of e^(-t^2) dt, t=-infinity to infinity

The SQL Server Blocked Process Monitor makes monitoring, tracking and troubleshooting SQL Server 2008 and 2005 blocked processes easy. You will no longer have to manually enable and run a trace to capture the blocked process report. In addition, the application will parse the Report XML and use the sqlhandle information contained in the report to capture the actual sqltext from the sys.dmexecsql_text DMV as the blocking occurs. There are 2 versions of the application, one targeted at SQL Server 2008, and one at SQL Server 2005. You can download from CodePlex here.

Nothing earth shatteringly new; just for my reference:

— Get a comma separated list of a table’s column names
SELECT STUFF(
(SELECT
‘,’ + COLUMN_NAME AS [text()]
FROM
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE
TABLE_NAME = ‘TableName‘
Order By Ordinal_position
FOR XML PATH(”)
), 1,1, ”)

The lineup for May’s DevJam community event of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 7th May), is as follows:

Tiang Cheng: Developing Software as a Service with the Google API
Graeme Foster: ‘Dude, where’s my memory?’: Finding managed memory leaks using Windbg
Andy Dent: WPF layer-cake: C#, C++/CLI and C
Dave Gardner: NDepend
Rhys Campbell: Introduction to ASP.Net MVC
Adrian McGrath: Measuring .NET Application Performance – Application Instrumentation
Jeremy Thake: ‘What’s this ReSharper all about then?’
Hadley Willan: Partial classes with LINQ-SQL

DATE: Thursday, May 7th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

There are prizes for the presenters of the highest, audience voted talks (with the organisers’ decision as final in case of a tie break):

First Prize: Visual Studio 2008 Pro with MSDN Premium, worth approx. $3,500 (courtesy of Microsoft)
Second Prize: a Resharper License (courtesy of JetBrains), plus a copy of C# in a Nutshell (courtesy of Joe Albahari), plus a license for NDepend (courtesy of Patrick Smacchia).
Third Prize: a copy of Code Craft (courtesy of O’Reilly), plus a LINQPad auto-completion license (courtesy of Joe Albahari).
Audience Door Prizes: a Resharper License (courtesy of JetBrains), and a copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008 (courtesy of Dave Gardner).

In addition, the top 3 voted talks will each receive a copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008 (courtesy of Dave Gardner).

There will be pizza and refreshments provided.

Paul Randal has posted the results from his latest survey of physical database file/filegroup layouts for various database size categories over at his blog. Given that he received over 1000 responses, this is very interesting info.

This Microsoft support article, How to identify your SQL Server version and Edition, shows how for all versions from SQL Server 2008 back to 6.5

For SQL Server 2008:

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY(‘productversion’), SERVERPROPERTY(‘productlevel’), SERVERPROPERTY (‘edition’)

Microsoft have released an updated version of the Azure Services Training Kit:

The Azure Services Training Kit April update now includes the following content covering Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services:

• 11 hands-on labs – including new hands-on labs for PHP and Native Code on Windows Azure.
• 18 demo scripts – These demo scripts are designed to provide detailed walkthroughs of key features so that someone can easily give a demo of a service.
• 9 presentations – the presentations used for our 3 day training workshops including speaker notes.

The training kit is downloadable from here.

I was just researching a question on SQL Server replication, whether SQL Server 2000 can participate with SQL Server 2008 in a replication strategy. The answer is yes:

SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 can both participate in replication topologies with SQL Server 2008. For SQL Server 2000 the minimum version is Service Pack 3. For SQL Server 2005 the minimum version is Service Pack 2.

Ref: Using Multiple Versions of SQL Server in a Replication Topology

When you replicate between or among different versions of SQL Server, you are usually limited to the functionality of the earliest version used. For example, if you upgrade a Distributor to an instance of SQL Server 2008, but you have a Publisher that is running an instance of SQL Server 2005 and a Subscriber that is running an instance of SQL Server 2000, you are limited to the general functionality and replication functionality of SQL Server 2000.

Because the SQL Server on-disk storage format is the same in the 64-bit and 32-bit environments, a replication topology can combine server instances that run in a 32-bit environment and server instances that run in a 64-bit environment.

There are some breaking changes in the replication agent security model detailed here: Breaking Changes in SQL Server Replication

If you are interested in finding out more, there is no better place to start than Tristan Needham’s amazing Visual Complex Analysis.

Yesterday, I sat the Microsoft certification upgrade exam 70-454: Transition Your MCITP SQL Server 2005 DBD to MCITP SQL Server 2008 DBD. I followed Rob Farley’s advice:

“I always tell people to do exams during Second Shot season.

Reason being – it makes the first one a practice. Don’t bother studying, don’t bother stressing, just go and see how you do. Then you can sit it a second time for real.”

I’m not such a huge fan of the upgrade exams as they can be a bit hit and miss (after all, it’s hard to cover so much in a relatively small number of questions), but I passed. It was a very helpful experience; there were a few questions where I was unsure of the answers, so I came home and read up on them.

Microsoft’s Second Shot promotion, where you get a second chance to pass an exam, is on until June 30th 2009. In addition, if you register for second shot you can get any IT professional or developer e-learning collection for just US350).

You can also get 50% off Microsoft Certification exam for attending the sessions live on April 1st (today!): all TechDay attendees will be given a special URL and discount code to register for a Microsoft certification. You must take your exam by May 31, 2009.