Guest Columnist: Additional Articles

A new tool from Red Gate software that helps you generate realistic test data for testing your SQL Server applications.  Read more...

A new tool announced today for tired DBAs  Read more...

After the success of SQLBits 2007, it's back on March 1st in the UK.  Read more...

One of the strengths of Visual Studio .NET is its features for rapid application development, or prototyping. If, for example, you want to develop a Windows form that lets you maintain the data in one table of a database, you can usually do that in 20 minutes or less. This article will show you how.   Read more...

Test to see how much you know about SQL Server security. If you're one of the members to pass the test (72% score or higher), you're entered into a contest to win a copy of AppDetective and one year's worth of support (over $1500 value)! You can only take the test question test once and it is not timed. After the test, you'll be given the answers and why one answer is more correct than another. Questions are randomly chosen from a pool.  Read more...

In this session we’ll rapidly discuss the MSCS clustering architecture and deploying the system into your environment. We’ll then jump into a demo where we actually cluster a Windows and SQL Server system in under 60 minutes. We’ll discuss the administration tools and best practices on clustering and walk you through completing a cluster and fixing problems along the way. After this session, you should have just enough information to build you own SQL Server that is highly available.  Read more...

Join SQLServerCentral.com co-founder for this free webcast on SQL Server security best practices. In this session, we will look at how to protect your system from internal and external security factors. We will look at the types of permissions in your database objects, implementing column and row-level security, and protecting yourself from SQL Injection attacks. We'll also cover best practices for basic and advanced protection for your SQL Server system.  Read more...

This white paper discusses the basics of indexes, such as density and selectivity, effects of many versus few indexes, long versus short keys, covering indexes, and how the SQL Server optimizer chooses indexes  Read more...

In this series by Quest Software's Kevin Kline, he shows you some tips to performance tuning T-SQL. This was contributed by Quest from their recent webcast. This white paper discusses various T-SQL discovery, optimization and tuning techniques using the SET and DBCC commands.   Read more...

If your shop is even close to the typical Micosoft SQL Server environment there are several people that can (and do!) make changes to the production environment, a change management system is in place, that change management system uses Source Safe to store database scripts, and what's in Source Safe does not match what's on the SQL Server. This utility by Bill Wunder will archive your SQL scripts and DDL into Source Safe easily and efficiently. All for the price of $0 (yes, free!).  Read more...

These sets of scripts will add minimum password enforcement when a login is created or its password changes.  Read more...

Ever tried to open 1 Gig ASCII file with Notepad? WordPad? Do you remember ASCII codes of Tab and Carriage Return? Enter Terminator; huge ASCII file viewer and BCP helper. Terminator reads top 10 (and more if asked) records of ASCII file of any size. It detects record terminators and calculates current cursor position (field offset) and length of selected area (field length). Best of all, it's free!  Read more...

Laplas Soft has updated its ever popular freeware SQLExecMS. SQLExecMS makes a DBAs and developers life so much easier by building in a number of common untilites. You can download it free if you're a SQLServerCentral.com member!   Read more...

Are you migrating your database and applications from Oracle to SQL Server and having trouble converting your code from PL/SQL to T-SQL? Then this article might help, though it doesn't cover all aspects. It provides you with answers to most commonly asked migration relasted questions. You will also find links to additional resources and books.   Read more...

This program makes it easy to add and maintain extended properties for all objects in SQL Server 2000. Where as the Query Analyzer only allows you to maintain certain object SEPE allows all object to be maintained. This product is freeware for SQLServerCentral.com members.   Read more...

Thanks to the more than 1,300 people that voted in the 2002 SQLserverCentral.com Reader's Choice Awards. Now that the voting is complete, find out who you voted to be the best SQL Server product and book.  Read more...

The SQLServerCentral.com Reader's Choice Awards voting has begun. Vote for the product or book that you feel is best in breed and saves you the most time. Voting is simple and takes less than a minute.  Read more...

Want to be an author and be admired by the SQL Server community? Find out more details about how to be a writer for SQLServerCentral.com, visit this page.   Read more...

Have a SQL Server question? Challenge the largest SQL Server online community in our forums! If you think your a guru, test yourself by helping a newer DBA. SQLServerCentral.com has active forums with over 100 posts daily.   Read more...

This week, SQLServerCentral.com launched its Resource Center all about getting a sneak peak on Yukon. All links are user contributed.  Read more...