Everyone does demos. Selling software relies upon people viewing your software in action and being confident it will work. Managing a demo server can be a challenge and this series will look at different problems and options you have.   Read more...

Get started with using WMI (Windows Mgmt Instrumentation) by seeing two good scripts to start with, one to reboot the server, another to list all the services.   Read more...

New book! This new book by Ken Henderson (author of other 'GURU' books abou SQL) promises an all inclusive approach to the internals. Sample chapters and other info available by following the link. We'll try to get a review up soon!  Read more...

Andy returns to the Worst Practice series this week with a short article looking at how connection strings in applications affect what you see in sysprocesses. Perhaps less controversial (in our opinion) that some of the other worst practices, this is something easy to fix and definitely worth fixing! Read the article and post a comment - explore other points of view! Readers posting a comment will be entered in a drawing for a copy of the SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit.   Read more...

Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2000 is huge. There are significant changes in it and they apply to all three products: the core SQL Server, MSDE, and Analysis Services. Because there are so many changes, this first article in the series will only focus on the security changes.   Read more...

Seagate has a white paper out that discusses how faster (15k rpm) drives can lead to lower cost of ownership. Interesting, and worth looking into.   Read more...

New author! Mike Pearson discusses how auto close was at the root of a performance problem he was troubleshooting, how you can check your servers easily, and discusses why both auto close and auto shrink are bad ideas in a production environment.   Read more...

A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!   Read more...

Joseph recently had to upgrade a server from 4g to 8g of memory. Read how he did it and learn about some interesting aspects of AWE. For example, if you have 6.5g configured for use by SQL, how will task manager show used by sqlserver.exe?   Read more...

Have you ever had the problem where a user ran a query against your SQL Serer and crashed it or made the server unusable since the CPU was spiked at 100%? A SQL Server black box is the equivalent of a flight data record. The black box records all queries being passed to your SQL Server and other useful information like errors.   Read more...

This week we have another article from Andy that discusses some changes he made at work in conjunction with clustering all his database servers. Not a how-to, just comments about what was changed and why. Worth reading just for the reminder about the potential gotcha that @@ServerName can represent.   Read more...

There may be more ways than you realize to determine the version and service pack of SQL Server. This quick article by Dinesh Priyankara will show you 3 of those methods.   Read more...

As a DBA you do not need to know how to setup an Active Directory domain or a DNS server, but you still need to know how Kerberos, Service Principle Names, and hostnames are used to perform integrated authentication to a SQL Server. This article by new columnist Chad Miller shows you some of the more integral parts of troubleshooting running Windows Authentication security in a SQL Server environmnet.   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...

Although there are legitimate reasons for using filegroups, Chad Miller recently encountered a situation where they were used too much. He shows you in this article why and how to remove excessive filegroups.   Read more...

In SQL Server 2000, there is a database option to close the database when it is not in use. Every wonder what this is? Or when it should be used? Steve Jones takes a look at this seldom used option.   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...

Andy had a semi-disaster similar to the one he wrote about last year. Interesting to see the kinds of problems that happen to other people. This article raises some interesting points that are outside the scope of basic disaster recovery, looking at how/when to move databases to a different server and how to reduce the server load dynamically.   Read more...

Continuing on looking at demo servers, this article presents an interesting solution to ensuring consistent demos that was deployed out in the field for a client company.   Read more...

With SQL Server 2000 you are able to create databases or columns with a different collating setting than the server. This article will explain a couple of methods Greg has used to successfully change collation settings.   Read more...