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...

Andy has been busy lately on a project you'll be hearing more about soon (!), but he did manage to get part four of his managing jobs series done. This article discusses ideas for patterns to follow when building jobs, including writing to the console, setting errorlevels, and how to get them installed on the server. DBA's, if you're not developers, look at this article - this is stuff you can take to your development team and get better/more manageable jobs.   Read more...

David takes us through why he believes trying to run SQL and IIS on the same box is a bad idea. It's a common notion that it IS a bad thing to do, but you have real justification? Read this and you will!   Read more...

Another new author! Gheorge shares some ideas about importing event logs and using OLAP to analyze the results. Not a bad idea at all. How many of use OLAP as often as we should? Read the article, see if it's something you want to try - and let Gheorge know what you think!   Read more...

Collations hard to sort out (I know, bad joke)? Mike did what a good DBA gets paid to do, figure out an easy way to fix something and remove the chance of a user mistake at the same time. Good explanation and a couple scripts show how to handle column level collations.   Read more...

This articles makes the case for using SQL LiteSpeed over other backup solutions and presents some notes about why the DBA should manage backups rather than offloading to network administration.   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...

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...

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...

Greg returns with an article based on some practical experience using QA templates to save time and work. Good examples, good work through, good idea!   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...

This is a product we haven't reviewed yet, but looks interesting. A SQL editor type app, features listed include integration with Visual SourceSafe, 'intellisense' statement completion, and keyboard macro's.   Read more...

We've had a good run of jobs about job management lately, Randy sent us another one that looks at the job of job management and shows us how he tackled the problem.   Read more...

This article looks at change management from the perspective of the DBA, including how to use source control to your advantage and planning for 'self-healing' apps.  Read more...

This week Andy looks at where, when, and how jobs should be run and why you need to think about those items before you build the job. Part of this is deciding what runs on production servers and what doesn't.   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...

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...

Query Analyzer is a great tool for developing SQL code. There are a number of little tricks that can greatly increase the amount of work you can do with very little effort. This article starts looking at some of the features of this tool.   Read more...

In the second of a series of articles that targets the DBA new to an organization, this article looks at how to manage DTS packages.   Read more...