A patch to your SQL Server system can cause problems, but an unpatched SQL Server is unprotected. Learn the pros and cons of SQL Server patches.   Read more...

Alex and Alex continue their series of three articles on 'Unit Testing' database development work with some examples of unit testing stored procedures.   Read more...

Scott examines strategies for dealing with constraints that business stakeholders may put on software development teams.   Read more...

Learn about 13 production disasters that can bring down your business  Read more...

Auditing is something that almost every DBA needs to tackle at some point in his or her career. David McKinney brings a new twist on the solution by using XML and XSL to help implement auditing in your SQL Server application.   Read more...

To run with the pack in terms of performance, productivity, and competition, servers that are long in the tooth have to be put out to pasture regularly. But there might be (and usually is) some life left in these early retirees, and they can still be put to good use.  Read more...

How many cores (or hardware threads) can your code harness to get its answers faster?  Read more...

Service-Component Architectures (SCA) provide a programming model for implementing Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)  Read more...

When installing a SQL Server 2005 instance on your SQL 2000 machine, there are upgrade and compability issues such as linked servers, multi-server administration and log shipping.  Read more...

Managing a large number of servers can be quite the challenge for many DBAs and it seems to get worse each year as more servers are added without an increase in staffing. New author Mark Tierney brings us the first part of a series on the framework he's built to help manage his servers.   Read more...

A thought provoking article from SQL Server expert and trainer Andy Warren. As a DBA you should think about the rules and decrees you have developed over the years and revisit them for application in your current situation.   Read more...

Tracking changes to your development environments is important to ensure that your deployments to production go smoothly. Jacob Sebastion brings us a look at how well the Visual Studio Team System Edition for Database Professionals can help you with this task.   Read more...

Many state data-breach laws exempt encrypted data from PR-nightmare public-notice requirements, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's an easy answer to the data privacy challenge. Here's the lowdown on loopholes, caveats and options to consider when applying encryption.  Read more...

A look at Intel and AMD architectures for the future.   Read more...

This article discusses: How SQL injection attacks work, Testing for vulnerabilities, Validating user input, and more.  Read more...

Proper disk configuration can result in a lifetime of high performance for SQL Server databases. Go beyond storage capacity requirements and consider drive performance.  Read more...

SQL Server 2005 builds some great encryption tools into the product, but what if you are stuck with SQL Server 2000? SQL Server expert Michael Coles brings us the first part of a series along with a free toolkit to manage encryption and keys.   Read more...

This article looks at logging your database changes from a developer's perspective.   Read more...

Have you ever wanted to ensure that keywords in your data are easily searchable? Have you struggled with full-text search? New author Michael Ahmadi brings us an interesting idea for a keyword tracking and searching subsystem based on T-SQL and triggers.   Read more...

I regularly use SQLIO.EXE to gauge the maximum throughput a disk subsystem can sustain. Recently Microsoft released SQLIOSIM.EXE to provide better results for this type of test. However they didn't release any documentation on the tool and I could never figure out what it was trying to tell me. It looks like they finally did release a Knowledge Base article on SQLIOSIM. Give it a spin. I'd be curious to hear what you think of the tool.   Read more...