Free SQL Server 2000 Encryption for your data!!! Author Michael Coles has put together a tolljit and some XPs that you can use to encrypt your data with the Blowfish algorithm. It is hard to write good applications that encrpyt data and manage the keys and security. This will give you a great headstart on protecting your data.   Read more...

This article discusses why VBScript should be one of the tools you use to manage your server. Sample scripts show how to remove files over x days old and how to FTP files.   Read more...

The use of bitmasking is usually limited to decoding values in the system views, but it can be useful in other places when you want to save space. New author Lee Everest brings us an introduction to bitmasking and its use in SQL Server 2005.   Read more...

Francis Norton shows how to use regular expressions to fulfil some real world data validation requirements, demonstrating techniques ranging from simple number format checks, to complex string validation that requires use of regex's powerful "lookahead" feature.  Read more...

An updated version of xp_sql2exchange is now available, enabling you to publish SQL Server data easily to an exchange server. Read about this very cool extended stored procedure from author Steve Boriotti.   Read more...

his article will explore various methods of accessing SQL Server from inside Microsoft Expression Web. Microsoft Expression Web is a graphical development tool for creating web pages and is part of the new Expression Studio.  Read more...

Using a SQL Server back end with a Java application server may sound like an unnatural proposition but there's no need to bow to such arbitrary limitations. In this article you'll get step-by-step instructions on making a JDBC connection between the four most popular Java application servers and Microsoft SQL Server.   Read more...

Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 Reporting uses Microsoft SQL Server views to provide access to data from the tables in the SMS site SQL database and to offer an efficient reporting option. The SMS site SQL database contains a large collection of information about the network, computers, users, user groups, and many other components of the computing environment. This database also contains objects that represent SMS items such as advertisements, packages, queries, reports, and status messages.  Read more...

The use of bitmasking is usually limited to decoding values in the system views, but it can be useful in other places when you want to save space. New author Lee Everest brings us an introduction to bitmasking and its use in SQL Server 2005.   Read more...

Testing is an important part of programming and it is no different with SQL Server development. Longtime author Grant Fritchey brings us a look at the new testing features available in Visual Studio 2005.   Read more...

SQL Server has extensions to allow one to call COM based objects from within the server using T-SQL. While this is an interesting feature, it's may not be the best way to structure your applications due to performance reasons. New author Zach Nichter of ScalabilityExperts.com brings us an analysis of different ways of writing out to a file from within SQL Server. Read on to see the most efficient method of generating files on your server.   Read more...

SQL Server does a great job of handling concurrency & ensuring that users can make changes in multi-user systems without conflict. However there are times a strict calling order is needed.   Read more...

This article is a short summary of Windows utilities both GUI and command line intended for new SQL Server DBAs or those interested in learning some useful techniques.   Read more...

Perl has been a popular language for Unix administrators for years. It is flexible, easy to learn, and capable of doing some very powerful things with relatively few lines of code. In this article by Brian Kelly, he shows you how to connect to SQL Server via Perl.   Read more...

Not many people enjoy using Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs), partly because they are cumbersome to type and work with for humans. However they fill a need and can provide some interesting benefits. SQL Server expert Andy Warren takes us through what a GUID is and how you can use it easily in your code.   Read more...

Lightweight and adaptable, but with proper emphasis on the design phase, the ICONIX methodology can help you avoid Constant Refactoring After Programming...   Read more...

This is a good explanation on how to acctually bill a customer for your service over a credit card in your web application.  Read more...

Part 1 of a 4 part series about ADO, this is a beginner level article designed to get you started using the ADO connection object. If you haven't used ADO so far, why not see what it's all about?   Read more...

For many of us, working with the identity property allows us to easily generate a sequential series of numbers. But what if you need to generate a sequence according to some pattern, like one that includes the year? New author Asif Sayed brings us a technique and the code for generating a patterned sequence.   Read more...

In this article I will show you how you can implement security on a WCF service. There are many options and extensibility points for implementing security in WCF. You can also use specific products, such as the Windows 2003 Server Authorization Manager, together with WCF to implement the authorization requirements of a solution. Out of the box, WCF supports Windows credentials, Username Tokens and X.509 Digital Certificates as security credentials.   Read more...