David recently worked on a project where it turned out storing the answers to a survey using bitmapping was a good approach. He was good enough to write some of it down and share. As he notes bitmapping isn't used as often as it used to be, but it can still be a useful technique to have around.   Read more...

As Chris points out, in most applications these days you end up having to go with optimistic locking, which presents a few challenges. Chris works through the list of options. If you're building web/disconnected apps and need anything besides last update wins, this one is for you.   Read more...

Full text indexing is interesting, but not always easy for the user to apply well. Chris has some ideas about to make that   Read more...

Another product review! Chris put AdeptSQL (a schema comparison and sync product) to work and wrote up the results. This article also includes some feedback from the vendor that is worth reading.   Read more...

A short but interesting article, the author has figured out a way to create a PDF from a stored procedure without using a third party library.   Read more...

Andy rates this one 4.5 out of 5 stars and likes it enough to recommend it's use at work. This is a book that should teach a developer how to use the key abilities of SQL. If you're looking for a book to guide your beginning/intermediate developers, this might be it.   Read more...

Bad data is almost a given, but true duplicate data can really cause you some headaches. How do you remove all the duplicates and still leave a 'keeper' record? If you think procedural code it's not too hard, but can you do a set based solution? Chris shows you show!   Read more...

As you might guess from the title, this is an extended stored procedure that you can use to interact with MSMQ. It's supposed to be extremely fast, able to handle 4-5k messages per second and have a very small memory footprint. (Press Release)   Read more...

Pedro Estrada has published a free tool that according to his site "This is a complete application to have an easier interface to work with BCP against MSSQL servers. Just specify a server, database, table user name and password to BCP out or IN." Worth a try, and he has some other free utilities (some SQL, some not) on the site.  Read more...

This article shows you how to identify SQL Server performance problems and explains how the SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation level effected the performance of an OLTP application.  Read more...

Robert is back this week with a look at the text data type. Not the easiest thing to work with, but sometimes a varchar just doesn't give you the range you need.   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...

Ryan demonstrates how he arrived at a solution that allows you to create scripts from a stored procedure using SQL-DMO. If you get interested in DMO, we've got quite a bit of additional content here on the site to help you get going! Ryan is a new author here on the site, please take a minute to read his article, add a comment, maybe just say hello.   Read more...

Fast Track to MDX gives readers all the necessary background information needed to write useful, powerful MDX expressions and introduces the most frequently used MDX functions and constructs. No prior knowledge is assumed and examples are used throughout the book to rapidly develop MDX skills to the point where a reader can solve real business problems. A CD containing examples from within the book, and a time-limited version of ProClarity, is included  Read more...

Robert is our expert on dynamic sql. This week he offers some good hints for planning the contruction of a proc that will use dynamic sql. He also adds some suggestions on how to format the code so that when you return to it later, you can figure out what you were doing!   Read more...

We've had a lot of coverage of dynamic sql (including another great one from Robert Marda later this week) but this one is a little different. Done in a question/answer format, Andy tries to explain to junior developers why dynamic sql is to be avoided, how to do so, what to do when you can't.   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...

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...

This one is pretty interesting, Andy discusses a few things he sees in comments that not only fail to add value, they end up costing extra time. There's room for discussion here, but definitely a discussion worth having - comments can make you or break you, here's a chance to think about what you think is important in commenting and pass that on to your development team.   Read more...

Are you using default values for your parameters? Using named parameters when you call the proc or passing the values by ordinal? Should you be? Andy thinks 6 out of 10 of our readers will agree with his point of view, we'll be a little more conservative and guess that 5 of out 10 will be closer.   Read more...