SQL Server User Group Review

There were 2 key speakers (blurb taken from an email from SQL Server User Group):

• Jasper Smith did the first stint on Admin stuff. He’s been an MVP for quite a while and has until recently been working at Nationwide. His blog can be found here and his website here. He’s got some great utilities like server manager for vista and Reporting Services scripter.
• Simon Sabin did the last session on dev stuff. He is also an MVP and is a freelance consultant and works as part of SQL Know How and SQL Skills. His blog can be found here.

• Database encryption – another enterprise only tool. You can now encrypt a database against a user defined key (stored as a certificate on the filing system). This will also result in tempdb being encrypted. When encrypted the mdf and ldf files are also encrypted, as are backups.
• Debugging has improved in the Management studio, can debug through a series of statements not just stored procedures.
• Using Inline variable assignment you can use a rowset to insert multiple data items in one line – Insert into values (1), (2), (3) – at the back end this gets translated into a union statement (see more here).
• Merge is introduced (finally) – see here for some posts about it. But the short version is the ability to do
  Merge Into
  Using
  When matched then
    Update set
  When target not matched then
    Insert
  Basically doing an insert and update in one statement. Merge is deterministic, and appears to be quicker but mileage may vary.
• CLR now handles larger data types (> 8000 bytes)