This is a high level article that compares the use of a DBMS with file management systems. Interesting to think about products that use the file system successfully - not everything needs SQL...or does it?   Read more...

David writes about the system he put together to handle addresses and the pros and cons of various techiques. Familiar with Soundex? He uses that too! Even though some of the info is specific to Great Britain, it's good reading. Addresses are one of the hardest pieces of information to handle!   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...

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...

Andy read this book recently and gave it a great review. Even though it's not a SQL book! Seriously, take a look at the review. It's a good book that is fun to read.   Read more...

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

Last week Andy started a discussion of the various ways you can reduce the number of round trips to the server. This week he continues by looking at a method he used recently to do client side caching of data to eliminate the round trip altogether. Gotta read it!   Read more...

Andy says it's not the greatest book for preparing for the 70-100 exam, but the case study is worth reading for it's explanation of the Microsoft Solution Framework. Read the full review!   Read more...

Should you use this book to prepare for the 70-100 exam? Read the review and find out!   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...

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