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Once, when disk space was at a premium, DBAs fought hard to keep the size of their database down. Now there seems less motivation to 'fight the flab' of a database. Fabiano Amorim was watching television recently when the subject matter, cosmetic surgery, gave him the theme and inspiration for this guide to keeping your database fit and trim.  Read more...

As multi-tier architectures grow over time, it is often challenging to coordinate those changes across the data, logic and presentation tiers. Unless planned and implemented carefully, an act as simple as adding a column to a table can grind all of the components of your application to a halt. While some of us have comfortable 12-hour maintenance windows every weekend, many of us are bound by service level agreements that are much more strict. So we must find ways to introduce fixes and new features with zero downtime, and without requiring every single component to be refactored at the same time.   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...

A brief introduction into the world of scalability, presenting at a high-level the various options  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...

My CIO and I have looked at a number of commercial solutions for documenting Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. However, we decided to use SQL Server 2005's built-in tools to create our own "home-grown" auditing system.   Read more...

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

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...

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...

Have you ever experienced a T-SQL query, a stored procedure, view or a trigger returning unexpected results. In this article by Raj Gill, he shows you how ANSI DEFAULTS may be to blame.   Read more...

We all know what the ideal application design environment is for building a database back-end: an experienced DBA takes inputs from end users and developers and creates the database design in order to support the application being developed. But in reality, we don't get the opportunity to do application design like this very often. This article covers how to quickly find and fix problems in a design.   Read more...