Is the Connect Feed for SQL Server in Your Reader?

Last week Nicolas Cain ( blog | twitter ) Rob Farley ( blog | twitter ) Aaron Bertrand ( blog | twitter ) and I were all working together on a small skunk-works project to read in all of of the items on the SQL-Connect website (more in that project in a later post).  A few hours into this process I realized “hey, I don’t even have this RSS feed in my Reader!”  I’m not sure why I didn’t; maybe I was lulled into safety by Aaron Bertrand’s “Connect Digests” but unfortunately he doesn’t do those any more.

So I just wanted to encourage everyone who makes their living off of SQL Server to take a minute to add these two RSS feeds to your favorite feed-reader. 

https://connect.microsoft.com/rss/68/RecentFeedbackForConnection.xml

https://connect.microsoft.com/rss/68/RecentlyModifiedFeedbackForConnection.xml

If you haven’t been on Connect for a while and wonder what’s out there, well I’ve got a PowerShell script for you  

Invoke-Sqlcmd -ServerInstance denali.db.5026258.hostedresource.com `
-Database denali -Username denaliconnect -Password Wide0pen -Query "
SELECT ID
        , Title
        , ItemStatus
        , UpVoteCount
        , DownVoteCount
        , ItemDescription
        , Author
        , Modified
        , ValidationCount
        , WorkAroundCount
        , URL
        , OpenedDate
  FROM denali.dbo.ConnectItems" | out-gridview

OK, you can totally take that login info and use your SQL Management Studio to connect to this database too but I wanted to show you a REALLY cool use for the Out-GridView command.  When run the PowerShell script and the window pops up Just Click on + Add Criteria > ItemDescription > Add.

Like this:

Then just type in a search term like “SSIS” and see what you get back…

Rob has also put together a way to search the data that is much better and where we hope to ultimately go with it.  Again, that’s all for another post.