This is one Machine to rule them all (I know Lord of Rings is so old school). In the Virtual Machine you will get the following.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise [...]

Riviera is a sample application for Windows Azure available on MSDN Code Gallery for download. Riviera has been developed by Platform Evangelism group in collaboration with Cumulx who are a Cloud ISV partner. Key features of Riviera are:

Multi-tenant data store based on Azure Table Storage as well as SQL Azure.
Per tenant customization of data model
Per [...]

SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit is available for download from Microsoft. Here is some information about this training kit taken from Microsoft’s site.
The SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit will help you understand how to build web applications which deeply exploit the rich data types, programming models and new development paradigms in SQL Server [...]

SSMS Tools Pack is a must have add-in for SQL Server Management Studio. It comes packed with a great set of features which as the author says on his site “…were missing from Management Studio”. Here is run down of three features I use most.
Text Format
If SSMS Tools Pack had only one feature and [...]

You’ve got to love sys views in SQL Server. While learning about performance tuning on SQL Server 2008 I wanted to get a list of all Indexes on my database and the answer was as simple as it can be. Here i a statement which can be used to get a list of all indexes [...]

To find out the space used by a table we can use sp_spaceused procedure. Most of the times sp_spaceused will give correct information. Why do I say most of the time? Well consider this example. I just inserted a large amount of data in Orders table in Northwind database and ran sp_spaceused.
EXEC sp_spaceused ‘Orders’
which returns [...]

Every object in SQL Server database has an Object Id which is used extensively by SQL Server for most operations. There are times when we would like to know what the object ID is for a particular object. In this example I will show you two ways to retrieve Object Id. My examples will retrieve [...]

In this walkthrough I will show you how to use Red Gate SQL Data Generator to generate test data for a database. While writing software which interacts with a database developers often write scripts to insert some data. Usually this data is not big enough to find performance bottlenecks and/or issues with presenting data on [...]

This script returns all default constraints on a table in a SQL Server 2008 database. It gives me the name and definition of the constraints on Person.Address table in Adventure Works database. You can substitute the table name with any other table to get the constraints for that table.
SELECT [name],
[...]

It feels good when you find a hidden gem on www. Through a link trail which I cannot remember now I somehow landed up on SQL Server 2008 Jumpstart site. Here you can access training material which is categorised into four tracks.

Database Infrastructure Track
Business Intelligence Track
Developer Track
Application Compatibility & Upgrade Track,

 
Each of the tracks have [...]

In SQL Server 2008 you can find if a database is online of offline by querying databases system view. A simple query such as this one gives me a list of all databases on my server and the second column shows if the database is online or offline.

SELECT Name, state_desc
FROM sys.databases

On my server [...]

SQL Server by default follows Windows password policy requirements for SQL Server Login accounts. This forces you to follow the same policy for SQL Server logins as you would for windows logins and this is a good thing. But sometimes you want to bypass that validation maybe to get a test login in place. You [...]