Microsoft has posted the first cumulative update for SQL 2008 under article 956717.

Once installed, your patched instance will go to version 10.0.1763 from 10.0.1442.

I'm blowing my budget this year in going to the Microsoft BI conference in Seattle, but for anyone else out there who, a) will miss the Microsoft BI Conference, or b) is lucky enough to afford two trips, then be sure to go to the DevConnections event in Las Vegas this November.

Some of us wear blinders when it comes to all things SQL Server and BI related, however DevConnections is broken out into several categories: SQL Server, SharePoint, ASP.NET, Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft Exchange, Windows and Unified Communications.

The main categories for SQL Server will be:

• SQL Server Administration
• SQL Server Development
• Business Intelligence
• SSWUG
• And one day for Microsoft presenters

The event will run from November 10^th to the 13^th. Early registration has already passed, but you still will get that free copy of SQL 2008.

Kevin Idzi of Microsoft was kind enough to leave a comment on my Extracting SharePoint Data using SSIS post informing me of Integration Services enhancements posted on CodePlex.

I had been delaying posting as I wanted to have a full sample showing it in use, but between work and buying a new house recently, I have not had the time to put together my virtual machine images for a complete demo.

The community sample has the following components available to download (in separate install packages):

• XML Destination Pipeline component
• Regular Expression Flat File for regular expression based flat file parsing
• Delimited Flat File Parser, for files with rows that are missing column fields
• Package Generation Sample
• Hello World Sample for demonstrating using the UI API
• SharePoint List Source and Destination – this component was written by Kevin
• WMI Source Component

All of these components are available for download here.

The base requirements for installing these components are .NET 3.5 and SQL 2008 Integration Services.

Once you run the MSI, you will be able to select the two new adapters from the "Choose Toolbox Items" dialogue:

One of the nice features that Kevin included in this adapter is the ability to execute CAML queries against the SharePoint List:

If you do not know how to write CAML or are not good at it like I am, then use the U2U CAML Query Builder written by Patrick Tisseghem; I've got a quick tutorial here: CAML Query Builder.

If you have any feedback about using this SharePoint List Adapter with SSIS, please be sure to leave comments or suggestions on the CodePlex site for Kevin and his team.

My blog is officially one year old now and I thought I would share some interesting facts, some gleaned from metrics generated by this blog engine and others from Google Analytics:

• 61 blog posts (not including this one)
• Over 1300 unique visitors from 71 different countries
• Average visitor spent 3 ½ minutes on the site and visited more than four pages
• Most popular blog post and still the most frequented these past few months is: Extracting SharePoint data using SSRS. This post represented 19.47% of all page views on my site for the past year
• 61.09% of traffic came from search engines, 31.08% from direct traffic and 7.83% from referring sites
• Given that this blog covers Microsoft technologies and methods, it is no surprise to me that Internet Explorer is 78.61% of browsers used against this site, though Google's Chrome is coming on strong given it's very recent release

I would like to thank everyone who has e-mailed me thanks, suggestions, questions and random comments this past year. Please keep them coming!

I will be starting a pet project this month that will cover aggregations over public economic data – data feeds that the Treasury, Federal Reserve, Labor Stats Dept., etc. put out on a regular basis. It is pretty ambitious, will be long running, but done in many small phases. I will post updates here, as well as talk about all that I learn along the way. The site, once the shell is posted later this month, will be located at: http://www.datapublicus.com.

Please feel free to e-mail me with any questions or suggestions, and for anyone going to the Microsoft BI conference next month, hope to see you there!

Earlier this year, I posted a short feature on auditing in SQL 2005 using DDL triggers to capture events and log them. In SQL 2008, one of the less sexy features added, though highly important and underscored by this current eras reporting and traceability debacles in public documents, is SQL 2008's new auditing features (less sexy from a populist point of view, I do note that there is probably an avid community out there with an audit fetish, so no intention of diminishing this feature's importance to you and yours).

Quite simply, it is implemented by the following sample syntax (full reference here):

One of the interesting switches you can use for auditing is the ON_FAILURE argument accepts parameters of CONTINUE or SHUTDOWN. If auditing is paramount for this system, then any failure in the auditing mechanism will turn the SQL Server service off. As auditing is SQL instance specific, this can be useful for many types of compliance scenarios.

The audit is set up at two levels; first, as shown in the script above, at the server level, which captures audit events (more on those events here).

The second level that can be implemented is at the database level. The script below is run within the context of the database I wanted the audit on, while the first script needs to be run within the context of the master database (full reference here):

This particular audit specification will capture all DDL executed against my particular database and make it part of the log.

For more, you can reference books line here for the Auditing home page for SQL 2008.

SQL 2008 has now been fully released for just over a month, and for those who have not been keeping track of additions throughout the CTPs and Release Candidates, here is a bit of useful information: SQL 2008 has 46 new DMVs(as of version 10.0.1442).

If you have a 2005 instance on your box along side your 2008 install, you can run this from your 2008 instance query to take a look at the output:

select name fromsys.all_objectswhere name like'dm_%'

except

select name from [localhost\sql2005instance].master.sys.all_objectswhere name like'dm_%'

Several of these DMVs correspond directly to feature additions such as Filestream, new cryptography features and resource governor, plus several that give more insight into the host OS.

Here is the complete list if you don't have a 2005 instance handy:

dm_audit_actions

dm_audit_class_type_map

dm_cdc_errors

dm_cdc_log_scan_sessions

dm_cryptographic_provider_algorithms

dm_cryptographic_provider_keys

dm_cryptographic_provider_properties

dm_cryptographic_provider_sessions

dm_database_encryption_keys

dm_db_mirroring_auto_page_repair

dm_db_mirroring_past_actions

dm_db_persisted_sku_features

dm_exec_procedure_stats

dm_exec_trigger_stats

dm_filestream_file_io_handles

dm_filestream_file_io_requests

dm_fts_fdhosts

dm_fts_index_keywords

dm_fts_index_keywords_by_document

dm_fts_outstanding_batches

dm_fts_parser

dm_os_dispatcher_pools

dm_os_dispatchers

dm_os_memory_brokers

dm_os_memory_node_access_stats

dm_os_memory_nodes

dm_os_nodes

dm_os_process_memory

dm_os_spinlock_stats

dm_os_sys_memory

dm_resource_governor_configuration

dm_resource_governor_resource_pools

dm_resource_governor_workload_groups

dm_server_audit_status

dm_sql_referenced_entities

dm_sql_referencing_entities

dm_tran_commit_table

dm_xe_map_values

dm_xe_object_columns

dm_xe_objects

dm_xe_packages

dm_xe_session_event_actions

dm_xe_session_events

dm_xe_session_object_columns

dm_xe_session_targets

dm_xe_sessions