Guest Columnist: Leo Peysakhovich

More and more companies are using data warehouses as a way of consolidating business critical information. And more and more of these companies want the warehouse available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This presents interesting challenges for the DBA involved in ETL processing. Longtime author Leo Peysakhovich brings us one solution for this problem.   Read more...

Longtime author Leo Peysakhovich answers one of the most common questions seen in discussion areas around the world: how do you identify unused objects?   Read more...

One of the big complaints in SQL Server development has been error handling. SQL Server 2005, however, substantially enhances its capabilies in this area and Leo Peysakhovich brings some code that provides a template for adding error handling to your application.   Read more...

For many SQL Server 2000 DBAs working with text columns in T-SQL is no different than any other datatype. But there are some tricks when you work with very large values that you need to know. Leo Peysakhovich brings us some advanced queries that you might need if you work with large XML documents as he does.   Read more...

Have you ever wanted an easy way to determine if a job is running for automated checks? This might not be an easy way, but Leo Peysakhovich provides a way that works and corrects an error in Books Online.   Read more...

Auditing is becoming more and more important in many SQL Server environments. DBAs are being tasked with setting up, maintaining, and reporting on audit data. Author Leo Peysakhovich brings us one of his solutions to automatically generate an audit trail for your data.   Read more...

There are times when a new application or time period requires the creation of a number of logins for your clients. This can be a time consuming process, but Leo Peysakhovich brings us a way to make this go quickly.   Read more...

SLQ Server has a fantastic job scheduling system, but there are some times that things go wrong. Leo Peysakhovich brings us another great article that looks at a way to check if your job engine is running and how to restart it. Practical code included in this one.   Read more...

The SQLAgent scheduler in SQL Server 2000 is an amazing tool that allows you to schedule many different kinds of jobs with a great deal of flexibility. However, it doesn't have great facilities for handling jobs that may take longer than expected. And about which you'd like to be notified. Leo Peysakhovich brings us his code and technique for detecting when a job step runs long.   Read more...

SQL Server 2000 is a self tuning, self balancing application that performs wonderfully under a wide variety of loads and conditions with a minimal of administrative tuning. However there are some things that you can do when building T-SQL code and working with SQL Server to maximize performance. Leo Peysakhovich brings us part two of his series looking at some different scenarios and how you can structure your code for better performance.   Read more...

SQL Server 2000 is a self tuning, self balancing application that performs wonderfully under a wide variety of loads and conditions with a minimal of administrative tuning. However there are some things that you can do when building T-SQL code and working with SQL Server to maximime performance and assist the query optimizer in selecting the best query plans. Leo Peysakhovich brings us the first part of his series looking at some different scenarios and how you can structure your code to achieve   Read more...

SQL Server excels at quickly acquiring and releasing locks to allow as much concurrency as possible on the server. However there are times that one user will block another, which can be a source of great user frustration as well as making the system appear to be slow. Leo Peysakhovich brings us some great information and code on how you can monitor and deal with blocking on your SQL Server 2000 server.   Read more...

Datetime data in SQL Server can be a little confusing to work with, especially as many front end languages do not combine the date and time into a single datatype. As a result, T-SQL is sometimes used to manipulate and convert datetime data into more useable formats. Author Leo Peysakhovich has written about some tricks that he uses to reformat and work with datetime data.   Read more...

SQL Server has some great solutions for writing reports easily, ensuring quick service for your customers. However many of the quick ways of generating reports from the database include the column headers in the results. And often clients who expect customized work want to see labels that are more familiar to them. Leo Peysakhovich has developed a way that allows him to easily return custom labels from his stored procedures.   Read more...

Comparing two SQL Server tables to determine if the data is the same ought to be pretty simple. But then again, vendors like Red Gate Software sell tools to help you do it, so perhaps it isn't so simple. Author Leo Peysakhovich has to do this on a regular basis and none of the 3rd party products appear to work for him. Read his thoughts and samples on how he handles this at his job.   Read more...

User defined functions were added in SQL Server 7 and enhanced in SQL Server 2000, but they are still a relatively little used feature. Here's a look at a unique way that Leo Peysakhovich solved a problem using a UDF.   Read more...

NULL values in columns can indicate a few things, the value isn't known, it's not yet been filled in, or perhaps, as Leo Peysakhovich argues, the column isn't being used? How many SQL Server tables do you have with extra tables and columns that are not being used? Or maybe never have been? This article looks at a statistical analysis of columns using NULLs to determine if you might be able to remove certain columns.   Read more...

SQL Server Alerts provide a great way for the server to notify a DBA that some event has occurred, usually something bad that they need to fix. However alerts can also be used to drive business logic processes and enable some types of actions to be safely performed without requiring extraordinary rights by a user. Author Leo Peysakhovich brings us some ideas on how we can use alerts to implement business logic processing.   Read more...

Designing a SQL Server database is a challenging task. Making decisions about how to build tables, their relations, etc. can be a full time job for any DBA helping to build an application. Lookup tables are a part of just about every application that you work with or build a back end for. Leo Peysakhovich brings us an article on database design that deals specifically with lookup tables.   Read more...

SQL Server DTS is an amazing ETL tool. Parallel processing is not only possible, but author Leo Peysakhovich shows us how he does it in this article about his index rebuild process. By bundling DTS into SQL Server for free, Microsoft gave us a platform for not only ETL, but also many basic tasks that all DBAs are stuck working on. Read on to see if parallel processing of index rebuilds is something you can use.   Read more...