In the middle of August 07, Microsoft released the Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals Power Tools (available here). T-SQL Static Analysis is one of the features in this first release. There are fourteen rules that it currently uses when scanning SQL code. They fall into three categories:

Microsoft.Design

• SR0001 - Avoid SELECT * in stored procedures, views and table valued functions
• SR0008 - Use @@IDENTITY with caution
• SR0009 - Avoid the use of very small variable length types (size 1 or 2)
• SR0010 - Avoid old style join syntax
• SR0013 - Populate output parameters in all code paths (when no default is present)
• SR0014 - Maintain data type compatibility

Microsoft.Naming

• SR0011 - Avoid special characters in object names
• SR0012 - Avoid reserved words for type names
• SR0016 - Avoid sp_ prefix for stored procedures

Microsoft.Performance

• SR0004 - Avoid columns without index as test expressions of IN predicates
• SR0005 - Avoid patterns starting with "%" in LIKE predicates
• SR0006 - Move a column to one side of a comparison operator to make use of column index
• SR0007 - USE ISNULL(column, default_value) on nullable columns in expressions
• SR0015 - Extract deterministic function calls from WHERE predicates

There is currently very little documentation available on these rules, so I performed my own analysis. Documentation from Microsoft is likely to be available before mid November, but until then, take a read of my Analysis and Review*.

*This is hosted on my Sky Drive. Please let me know if you have any issues accessing this document!...FTD