SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 has been released

Service Pack 3 for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is now available. SQL Server 2005 service packs are cumulative, and this service pack upgrades all service levels of SQL Server 2005 to SP3. You can use these packages to upgrade any of the following SQL Server 2005 editions:

* Enterprise
* Enterprise Evaluation
* Developer
* Standard
* Workgroup

Note: To upgrade SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, obtain the SP3 version of Express Edition or Express Edition with Advanced Services.


Download SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ae7387c3-348c-4faa-8ae5-949fdfbe59c4&displaylang=en

CHESS: An Automated Concurrency Testing Tool

CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. It finds errors, such as data-races, deadlocks, hangs, and data-corruption induced access violations, that are extremely hard to find with current testing tools. Once CHESS locates an error, it provides a fully repeatable execution of the program leading to the error, thus greatly aiding the debugging process. In addition, CHESS provides a valuable and novel notion of test coverage suitable for multithreaded programs. CHESS can use existing concurrent test cases and is therefore easy to deploy. Both developers and testers should find CHESS useful.

More including a video can be found here: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/CHESS-An-Automated-Concurrency-Testing-Tool/

The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers

Check out this blogpost titled The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers



Here is what is in that post

1) Selecting all the values from a table for a particular date
2) Search all columns in all the tables in a database for a specific value
3) Splitting string values
4) Select all rows from one table that don't exist in another table
5) Getting all rows from one table and only the latest from the child table
6) Getting all characters until a specific character
7) Return all rows with NULL values in a column
8) Row values to column (PIVOT)
9) Pad or remove leading zeroes from numbers
10) Concatenate Values From Multiple Rows Into One Column

So check it out here: The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers