Sizing a database can be one of the most arduous tasks a DBA, analyst or developer must attend to. It?s time consuming and more hours go into analyzing the database than actually sizing it. This article focuses on how to monitor the database?s growth after its deployed and contains some tips on how to size it before deployment. We will also dive a little into how to benchmark your database against a robust data load.   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...

Sizing a database can be one of the most arduous tasks a DBA, analyst or developer must attend to. It?s time consuming and more hours go into analyzing the database than actually sizing it. This article focuses on how to monitor the database?s growth after its deployed and contains some tips on how to size it before deployment. We will also dive a little into how to benchmark your database against a robust data load.   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...

Mindy explores the metadata stored in SQL 2000 to show you how to produce a simple and useful data dictionary!   Read more...

Most of us know what it is, or do we? Chris works on a good definition and along with that, gets into a good look at the problems denormalization creates and talks about a pretty common form of it - the indexed view.   Read more...

Chris Kempster brings us a basic look at the database design topic of denormalization.  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...

This article by Simon Galbraith (from Red Gate software, maker of SQL Compare) discusses migrating changes from development to staging, QA, and on to production. If you've never seen the need for a schema compare tool (Steve Jones!), this is worth reading.  Read more...

Disk space is getting cheaper everyday. Why should you worry about the amount of space your data is consuming? This article by Neil Boyle presents some great reasons why you should be concerned.   Read more...

Jobs are pretty basic aren't they? They are until you get a couple hundred, or a thousand. Andy continues talking about managing jobs by standardizing how you handle notifications and failures, and talks about an interesting idea to monitor jobs separately from SQL Agent. Worth reading!   Read more...

How many jobs do you have? 10? 100? 1000? Andy makes the point that what works to manage for a small number of jobs doesn't work when that number doubles or triples (well, unless you only had 1 job to start with!). In part one of two, this article looks at ideas for using categories and naming conventions to get things under control.   Read more...

A few months ago Greg Larsen ran across a big problem with SQL Server collation when querying. He shares his bruises in this quick article.   Read more...

This article discusses an often-overlooked feature of SQL Server called user-defined data types.   Read more...

This article briefly discusses SQL Server's data and procedure cache and shows you the common Transact-SQL statements/command and system tables that you can use to interact with the cache through Transact-SQL.   Read more...

The strength and holy grail of relational databases lies in the very name: relations. Microsoft has put a good deal of intelligence and cunning into query optimizations, caching, indexing and execution plans to make the process of finding related records even smoother and faster. This small article, however, will try to shatter the very sacred notion of relational databases.   Read more...

Bill Wunder has donated his utility for those who have a free SQLServerCentral.com mebership. The DDL Archive Utility will look into a database and automatically archive the DDL from the database into Source Safe saving hours of hassles!   Read more...

Version control for stored procedures isn't always popular and certainly isn't easy. Or can it be? Andy discusses a technique he used on a recent project that you might find interesting.   Read more...

Mindy explores the metadata stored in SQL 2000 to show you how to produce a simple and useful data dictionary!   Read more...

Last week Andy started a discussion of the various ways you can reduce the number of round trips to the server. This week he continues by looking at a method he used recently to do client side caching of data to eliminate the round trip altogether. Gotta read it!   Read more...

Chris Kempster brings us a basic look at the database design topic of denormalization.  Read more...

Most of us know what it is, or do we? Chris works on a good definition and along with that, gets into a good look at the problems denormalization creates and talks about a pretty common form of it - the indexed view.   Read more...

A few months ago Greg Larsen ran across a big problem with SQL Server collation when querying. He shares his bruises in this quick article.   Read more...