Some useful undocumented extended and stored procedures in SQL Server 2005  Read more...

Two weeks ago Andy started his wildly successful series on Worst Practices. This week he continues that series discussing why failing to use primary keys and clustered indexes are worst practices. Agree or disagree, read the article and join the discussion. One thing you'll have to admit, reading an article by Andy is a lot more interesting than reading Books Online!   Read more...

Often developers are tasked with not only developing functional code, but also with ensuring that the code they develop scales well and performs in the application environment.  Read more...

How to use XML to pass Multi-Select parameters from Reporting Services to SQL Server.  Read more...

The need to test a program that accesses and manipulates a back-end SQL Server® database is very common. In many such cases, the application interacts with the back-end data through the use of SQL stored procedures. In this type of scenario, you can think of the stored procedures as auxiliary methods of the system under test; and they must therefore be tested just like any other module in the system.  Read more...

In this article we will share some of the common reasons for slow-running queries and what your approach should be for identifying and fixing them.   Read more...

Many people have used a "Numbers" or "Tally" table without really knowing what it does. This is an introduction as to how a Tally table replaces a loop.  Read more...

This article explores the options available in SQL Server 2005 for Slowly Changing Dimensions.  Read more...

Over the past few years, software developers have used various kinds of technologies to retrieve data from relational databases. SQL Server 2000 is the first Microsoft DBMS to fully support XML. In this article the author concentrates on the FOR XML clause in SQL Server versions, 2000 and 2005. Click on title for more  Read more...

A unique solution that allows Reporting Services to easily publish information from your SQL Server Error logs.  Read more...

Most of us DBAs have worked on our career to get where we are. A DBA is usually a second or third step in IT and we we've looked to advance our understanding of technology. Jeffrey Yao now brings us a new level of database work to which we may aspire.   Read more...