Do you know the difference between a login and a user? What's the best way to add them; Enterprise Manager, T-SQL, or SQL-DMO? In this beginner level article Andy demonstrates how to use all three methods to add logins and users and offers his view of which is the best technique.   Read more...

Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit!   Read more...

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

A new article from MSDN magazine on stopping SQL Injection attacks by examining how the SQL can be exploited. It's a good basic article for developers as well as DBAs who might have to review code.  Read more...

As Chris points out, in most applications these days you end up having to go with optimistic locking, which presents a few challenges. Chris works through the list of options. If you're building web/disconnected apps and need anything besides last update wins, this one is for you.   Read more...

Another product review! Chris put AdeptSQL (a schema comparison and sync product) to work and wrote up the results. This article also includes some feedback from the vendor that is worth reading.   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...

This week Andy looks at where, when, and how jobs should be run and why you need to think about those items before you build the job. Part of this is deciding what runs on production servers and what doesn't.   Read more...

Do you know the difference between a login and a user? What's the best way to add them; Enterprise Manager, T-SQL, or SQL-DMO? In this beginner level article Andy demonstrates how to use all three methods to add logins and users and offers his view of which is the best technique.   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...

This one is pretty interesting, Andy discusses a few things he sees in comments that not only fail to add value, they end up costing extra time. There's room for discussion here, but definitely a discussion worth having - comments can make you or break you, here's a chance to think about what you think is important in commenting and pass that on to your development team.   Read more...

Following up on a question posted in our discussion area, Andy demonstrates how to backup/restore a database using DMO, how to get the list of files to be restored, and how to do a restore with no recovery. Lots of sample code!   Read more...

If you've been with us for a while you know that Andy started a series last year on worst practices. As he says, maybe you can't always do best practices, but at least dont do the worst ones. Read the article and add a comment, participate!   Read more...

In this follow up to one of our most popular articles, Andy responds to comments posted by readers and discusses how to manage SQL logins effectively in your applications.   Read more...

Programmers can most commonly relate to interface-based programming in their programming language. This is harder to accomplish in SQL Server though. In this article by Chris Cubley, he shows you how to build interfaced-based SQL.   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...

Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit!   Read more...

Architectural choices for data access affect performance, scalability, maintainability, and usability. This article focuses on the performance aspects of these choices by comparing relative performance of various data access techniques, including Microsoft® ADO.NET Command, DataReader, DataSet, and XML Reader in common application scenarios with a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database.  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...

As Chris points out, in most applications these days you end up having to go with optimistic locking, which presents a few challenges. Chris works through the list of options. If you're building web/disconnected apps and need anything besides last update wins, this one is for you.   Read more...

A new article from MSDN magazine on stopping SQL Injection attacks by examining how the SQL can be exploited. It's a good basic article for developers as well as DBAs who might have to review code.  Read more...

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