Back in 2005 Kimberly produced two very popular webcast series - an 11-part webcast series for TechNet called SQL Server 2005 for the IT Professional and a 10-part webcast series for MSDN called A Primer for Proper SQL Server Development. The webcast links and blog posts were broken for quite a while but now they're all fixed up and working again. I've created some web pages that link to all the webcasts and blog posts, along with abstracts. I've also included some more recent ones too and will be adding to the list over the next few weeks.

There's over 30 hours of good stuff to watch - check them out at http://www.sqlskills.com/webcasts.asp

While trawling through the latest 2008 Books Online this morning to answer a question, I noticed a new section that I hadn't seen before, which explains in detail how to perform a rolling upgrade with database mirroring. The link to the MSDN page is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677181.aspx and below I've linked to the flowchart from that page.  

Books Online also has a lot of other "how-to" topics around database mirroring - here are some links:

• 2005 mirroring how-to topics: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175059(SQL.90).aspx
• 2008 mirroring deployment how-to topics: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510479.aspx
• 2008 mirroring administration how-to topics: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175059.aspx
• 2008 mirroring monitoring how-to topics: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280423.aspx

Kevin Cox of the SQLCAT team also just blogged about a customer upgrade from 2005 to 2008 and some of the issues they faced. Btw - if you're not subscribed to their blog, you definitely should be - lots of cool stuff.

And now the bug. In 2008 RTM, if your database contains full-text then mirroring will not work when you perform a rolling upgrade. This is explained in KB 956017 (with a trace-flag workaround) and KB 957816, which points at 2008 RTM CU1 that has the fix in.

Cumulative Update 1 for SQL 2008 RTM contains fixes for two nasty FILESTREAM bugs (among a lot of other bug fixes).

The first one concerns restoring a 2008 database from a series of log backups when the database contains FILESTREAM info. It's possible that a race condition can cause one of the log backups to miss backing up a FILESTREAM file - resulting in a corrupt database after a restore operation. See KB 957809 for more details.

The second bug occurs when a clustered index is rebuilt using ALTER INDEX ... REBUILD and the table contains FILESTREAM data. In this case, it's possible that all the FILESTREAM files are copied, meaning the rebuild operation can take a very long time if there's lots of large FILESTREAM data values in the table. There's no need for the FILESTREAM data to be copied during an index rebuild as the FILESTREAM locations and filenames remain the same. See KB 957823 for more details.

You can get the fixes for these in CU1 - see KB 956717 for the download (right at the top of the page) and the list of all other fixes included in the update.