Finally!

Google announces an honest-to-goodness relational DB for App Engine: Google Cloud SQL. And it's the nice, familiar MySQL engine with virtually full support and very few limitations. Notably missing from that FAQ is anything about limits on how long a statement can take to complete (I've asked the question), but other than that...

Copying table structure in SQL Server

Why didn't I know this? For so many years I've bemoaned the fact that SQL Server doesn't have MySQL's CREATE TABLE LIKE statement:

CREATE TABLE NewTable LIKE ExistingTable

Um, er, except it does:

SELECT TOP 0 INTO NewTable FROM ExistingTable

The INTO clause of SELECT...

"...creates a new table in the default filegroup and inserts the resulting rows from the query into it." (MSDN link)

And of course, if you use TOP 0, there are no rows — but the table structure still gets created. (Naturally, if you want to copy the data as well, just leave off the TOP 0.)
Sometimes, you think you know something doesn't exist, and it turns out you just haven't looked hard enough to find it...
Happy coding,