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The transaction log is a fairly complex construct in SQL Server and present in every database installation. New author James Rea brings us a great introduction to how the log works and how to maintain it.  Read more...

That said, even though my personal focus is pretty much OO, I still miss stuff. SQL Server 2005 came out with the CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY operators and I have just started learning how to use APPLY in the last month or so. When I think I have it figured out, I am fortunate enough that some of you are interested in reading about my understanding of the technology.  Read more...

The conclusion of our coverage of the Reporting Services component available in SQL Server 2005 Express Edition discusses systematizing the troubleshooting approach by focusing specifically on performance problems (as opposed to those impacting functionality).  Read more...

Is there a way to not allow users to use SELECT * in their queries? New author AJ Raghuram has an interesting solution that can prevent this in code.  Read more...

Take this survey and help out the Managed Provider team at Microsoft.  Read more...

We are storing large text and URLs that are over 900 bytes in some of our tables and have a requirement to enforce uniqueness in those columns. But SQL Server has a limitation that index size can't be over 900 bytes. How do I enforce uniqueness in these columns and is it possible to achieve this in SQL Server 2005 and above? What are my different options to solve this problem? I heard that we can use CHECKSUM to create a hash, but is it possible to avoid collisions in the hash value as we are storing millions of rows?  Read more...

Loading EBCDIC data into SQL Server is not a well documented process - this article provides a very useful guide to optimizing the performance of this operation.  Read more...

A step by step example of how to add pre-calculated closing balances through T-SQL and semi-additive measures from Johan Åhlén.  Read more...

Query performance can be affected by many different factors. This article introduces another best practice of how and how not to use a function within your T-SQL statements.  Read more...

Of all of the reader email I get, just these two things alone reminded me that of course I don't know everything, and many of you are working at a widening level of experience. To that end, this article is an old school article that shows new-to-WinForms programmers how to read data from controls and contrive SQL that updates a database.  Read more...