Another Year Gone - 2008 in Review

It is really amazing to look back on 2008, and see what all I have accomplished both personally as well as professionally.  At the start of 2008, I was completely unknown in the SQL Server Community and online.  I had asked a grand total of 4 questions on the forums and had never once answer someone else's question.  I had never written a blog post, or technical article online.

To recap this year, I have replied over 5000 times to questions on MSDN forums, SQL Server Central Forums, and Microsoft Newsgroups.  I have posted 128 blog posts, written 2 articles for SQL Server Central and 28 articles on the SQL Examples Site on Code Project.  I also did a Live Meeting for the PASS DBA Special Interest Group, and presented at 3 user groups and 4 different conferences this year. 

If you are reading this and you haven't done a presentation, written a blog post, or online article, then hopefully this will motivate you to get your start.  If you think you don't know enough, or that people won't be interested, then try and do the presentation at your local user group first.  You'll be surprised with the outcome and amount of interest that there may be, I can almost guarantee it. 

ISNUMERIC functions differently SQL 2000 to SQL 2005

Did you know that the ISNUMERIC function works differently between SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005?  I didn't realize it until the other day when a post on the forums made me dig into it a little bit.

The difference is documented in the books online for sp_dbcmptlevel.

SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 Compatibility Level 80
In SELECT ISNUMERIC('<string>'), embedded commas within <string> are significant.

For example, the following SELECT ISNUMERIC('121212,12') query returns 0. This indicates that the string 121212,12 is not numeric.

SQL Server 2005 Compatibility Level 90
In SELECT ISNUMERIC('<string>'), embedded commas within <string> are ignored.

For example, the following SELECT ISNUMERIC('121212,12') query returns 1. This indicate that the string 121212,12 is numeric.

Pretty interesting, only the way to maintain the functionality if you actually expect it to return a zero (0) for commas means that you lose the ability to use things like CROSS APPLY, PIVOT, UNPIVOT, Common Table Expressions (CTE's), SQL CLR, and numerous other features in SQL Server 2005.  The only real way to go around this would be to change code to function differently and test for the commas or do a bulk update of the column to replace commas with a different symbol to force a failure or do an inline REPLACE in the SELECT.

Other Blogs that you should be Watching

Following my blog post from yesterday where I listed the major blogs from the SQL Server Team that you should follow, today, I am going to list some "unknown" blogs that you might consider following.  This post is more of a "pay it forward" type of post since Jason Massie, did a similar post and listed my blog in his list of ten blogs to follow and it tripled traffic to my blog. 

In no particular order:

Aaron Alton is a rising star in the SQL Server Community, and a fellow Moderator in the MSDN SQL Server Forums.  His blog can be found at  http://thehobt.blogspot.com.  Look to find posts similar to mine where the focus is around questions commonly asked on the MSDN forums.

Sankar Reddy is another Moderator from the MSDN SQL Server Forums as well who blogs at http://sankarreddy.spaces.live.com/.  Again his posts should be similar in nature to my own, and follow common problems seen in the community.

Gail Shaw is a fellow MVP, and a consistent top performer on the SQL Server Central forums.  She covered the PASS Summit live from PASS Summit, and is definitely worth following.

Microsoft Security Advisory (961040): Vulnerability in SQL Server Could Allow Remote Code Execution

This has been a hot topic online recently, and Jason Massie brought it up last week, and I have seen it blogged a few different places, but now it has a MSRC Advisory for it, and chances are, that your server is affected and you can't do much about it at the current point in time:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/961040.mspx

Since these Advisories are constantly updated to reflect the newest information, I am not going to rehash it here, but make sure that you read the Advisory and at least know whether you are affected and what your level of risk is.