I'm designing a table and I've decided to create an auto-generated primary key value as opposed to creating my own scheme or using natural keys. I see that SQL Server offers globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) as well as identities to create these values. What are the pros and cons of these approaches?  Read more...

In SQL Server 2005 there is the concept of alias data types, which are similar to user-defined data types in SQL Server 2000. Yakov Shlafman brings us the first part of a series looking at these structures in SQL Server 2000.   Read more...

SQL Server guru David Poole takes a look at the different integer data types and the impact of each of those on your database.   Read more...

Continuing on with his series on ADTs, Yakov Shlafman takes a look at working with schema changes when your ADT is on a column used as a primary or foreign key.   Read more...

In SQL Server 2005 there is the concept of alias data types, which are similar to user-defined data types in SQL Server 2000. Yakov Shlafman brings us the first part of a series looking at these structures in SQL Server 2000.   Read more...

SQL Server guru David Poole takes a look at the different integer data types and the impact of each of those on your database.   Read more...

Last week we discussed character datatypes and their performance effects on your database. This week,we will dive into numeric datatypes. We will discuss how SQL Server numeric datatypes are stored and the pros and cons of each.   Read more...

The Unique Identifier datatype in SQL Server has tremendous potential to solve many of the issues one finds with Identity fields, other primary keys, etc. However it also has some drawbacks and limitations. Author Sharad Nandwani looks at some of the pros and cons of this datatype.   Read more...

Joseph has written a couple articles for us and forwarded this link to an article he wrote recently on text type columns. You can see more of his work at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/jgama/.   Read more...

This article discusses an often-overlooked feature of SQL Server called user-defined data types.   Read more...

Identity columns are last years news. Have you experimented with uniqueindentifiers - better known to programmers as GUID's? Guaranteed to be unique in the world, they offer a powerful alternative to identity columns.   Read more...

Last week we discussed character datatypes and their performance effects on your database. This week,we will dive into numeric datatypes. We will discuss how SQL Server numeric datatypes are stored and the pros and cons of each.   Read more...

In the latest release of SQL Server, Microsoft has added a number of new data types to expand the functionality of SQL Server.   Read more...

The type of datatypes that you use in your schema could impact the performance and the accuracy of your database.   Read more...