Two weeks ago Andy started his wildly successful series on Worst Practices. This week he continues that series discussing why failing to use primary keys and clustered indexes are worst practices. Agree or disagree, read the article and join the discussion. One thing you'll have to admit, reading an article by Andy is a lot more interesting than reading Books Online!   Read more...

Two weeks ago Andy started his wildly successful series on Worst Practices. This week he continues that series discussing why failing to use primary keys and clustered indexes are worst practices. Agree or disagree, read the article and join the discussion. One thing you'll have to admit, reading an article by Andy is a lot more interesting than reading Books Online!   Read more...

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

Two weeks ago Andy started his wildly successful series on Worst Practices. This week he continues that series discussing why failing to use primary keys and clustered indexes are worst practices. Agree or disagree, read the article and join the discussion. One thing you'll have to admit, reading an article by Andy is a lot more interesting than reading Books Online!   Read more...

Disk space is getting cheaper everyday. Why should you worry about the amount of space your data is consuming? This article by Neil Boyle presents some great reasons why you should be concerned.   Read more...

A few months ago Greg Larsen ran across a big problem with SQL Server collation when querying. He shares his bruises in this quick article.   Read more...

The strength and holy grail of relational databases lies in the very name: relations. Microsoft has put a good deal of intelligence and cunning into query optimizations, caching, indexing and execution plans to make the process of finding related records even smoother and faster. This small article, however, will try to shatter the very sacred notion of relational databases.   Read more...

Bill Wunder has donated his utility for those who have a free SQLServerCentral.com mebership. The DDL Archive Utility will look into a database and automatically archive the DDL from the database into Source Safe saving hours of hassles!   Read more...

The core components to Microsoft XML parser have been updated and released to market. The update contains many bug fixes, new features and enhancements to performance.   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...

This article describes how to monitor Microsoft SMTP usage using SQL Server 2000 and XML.   Read more...

Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 introduced several new features for querying database tables and receiving the results as an XML document. Web release 1 of SQLXML (XML for SQL Server) added Updategrams and XML Bulk Load functionality, as well as a host of other features to the SQL Server 2000 base.   Read more...

We all know what the ideal application design environment is for building a database back-end: an experienced DBA takes inputs from end users and developers and creates the database design in order to support the application being developed. But in reality, we don't get the opportunity to do application design like this very often. This article covers how to quickly find and fix problems in a design.   Read more...

With XML support in SQL Server 2000, you can query SQL over HTTP with a URL, bring the data down to the browser, and manipulate it on the client machine. By adding Internet Explorer 5.0 to the mix and using XSL to convert the XML to HTML, you can lighten the load on your database server. Going still one step further, by using Vector Markup Language you can even create drawings on the fly using the data from your SQL queries.   Read more...