Today I appreciated filtering option in Management Studio's Object Explorer. It can help when you have thousands of objects in your database and you want to find one of them.

Today the article "What's new in database engine in SQL Server 2008 June CTP" was published on Technet Poland. It was written by Marcin Guzowski, SQL Server geek from Lublin. Click below to read the article.

What's new in database engine in SQL Server 2008 June CTP

If you want to check the version number of SQL Server instance, you can use sqlservr.exe utility with its option -v. The result it returns is given below.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn>sqlservr.exe -v
2007-06-21 07:04:39.49 Server Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - 9.00.3161.00 (Intel X86)
Apr 3 2007 09:04:30
Copyright (c) 1988-2005 Microsoft Corporation
Developer Edition on Windows NT 5.1 (Build 2600: Dodatek Service Pack 2)

2007-06-21 07:04:39.49 Server (c) 2005 Microsoft Corporation.
2007-06-21 07:04:39.49 Server All rights reserved.
2007-06-21 07:04:39.49 Server Server process ID is 6084.
2007-06-21 07:04:39.49 Server Authentication mode is MIXED.

Running sqlservr.exe -v does not start SQL Server service.

Watch the presentation from TechEd US 2007. David Campbell, SQL Server General Manager, talks about new features and visions.

David Campbell on SQL Server 2008 (DAT201_Campbell.wmv - 135 MB)

Simple things can make people happy. Among new functionalities and fixes there are some very simple and most wanted: fast variable initialization, multi-row constructors and table-vauled user-defined types. Some simple examples are given below.

-- Variable initialization
DECLARE @var int = 1
SELECT @var

-- Table types
CREATE TYPE Point AS TABLE
(
    X int,
    Y int
)
GO

DECLARE @var Point
INSERT INTO @var VALUES (1,1),(2,2),(3,3)
SELECT * FROM @var

Oh, and you can pass table-valued parameters to functions and procedures too.