from our correspondent with his finger on the pulse

Insider rumours and gossip from the murky world of the Database Industry, and from the colourful characters that inhabit it.

The following rumors have not been confirmed nor denied by anyone:

1. There are performance gains from negatively incrementing identity columns when paired with a decrementing index.
2. The query execution plan’s nested loop joins icon spins counter-clockwise (the other direction) when used in a spatial query with coordinates south of the equator.
3. The next version of SSMS will sport Silverlight for animated query execution plans with multi-touch gestures and a special gesture for cursors.
4. It is never appropriate to change your co-workers SSMS batch terminator from “go” to “select”, nor is it good to Set Explicit Transaction ON while they step away from their PC.
5. Red Gate is secretly developing a sound add-in for SQL server so that servers with sound cards and subwoofers will exhibit sound feedback according to the size of the transaction such as popguns, rifle shots, cannon explosions, and nuclear bomb. For the cursor operations, the server will make the sound of a slowly dripping faucet
6. While normalizing a database of historical conflicts between musicians and music producers, Joe Celko was overheard to say. “It’s not a row, it’s a record.”
7. Upset that every other feature set of SQL Server has a snapshot something, and feeling a bit left out, the Query Optimizer team today unveiled the new Snapshot Join operator which when optimized with a Snapshot Seek operation performs faster than any other team’s snapshot anything.
8. SQL 11’s new DateTime3’s max date is Dec 21, 2012 in recognition of the Mayan calendar and the pending apocalypse.
9. If you have cursors in your code, you should eliminate them immediately. Green-Peas has determined that cursors waste CPU cycles, cost extra energy, and therefor increase the carbon footprint of the database. The Green-Peas worm has infiltrated nearly 97% of SQL Server databases and is set activate today. Any databases with Cursors will be simply dropped and all backups deleted.
10. Dell has announced a CL-AID - a unique combination of RAID 1 and the cloud. The new controller creates mirrors the local hard drive with the cloud. While several scoffers have questioned the performance of such a configuration, …
11. When the moon is in the second phase, SQL Server does indeed support the SET GoFaster = 1 option.
12. There are some US States in the old deep south where you can git yerself in real trouble there boy if you use too many Union queries. Folks don’t take kindly to Union in the old deep south.
13. You know you write too much SQL when you think ); is a way cool emoticon meaning that “a normalized table is a happy table”.
14. A skunkworks team in Microsoft is working on VarNull(n) nullability. For example, explicitly declaring a variable as null generates a multi-value nullable variable
     
    DECLARE @Var = NULL(5)  
    CREATE TABLE NullTest (
      NullTest IN IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
      Name VARCHAR(255) NULL(7)
      )

    The Name column can now hold a value or any one of the 7 possible null states.

15. Microsoft will finally fix the spelling error in RaiseError. An ErrorUpgrade wizard will assist in identifying all the error’s errors.