New Author! Don Peterson writes his first article for us and explores why he considers XML to be...bad! There are some interesting points made here and if you've haven't thought about what XML means to you as a DBA, it's a subject worth spending some time on.   Read more...

How many DBAs need a solution to track those changes made for multiple systems? Auditing is becoming more and more prevalent in all systems and having a good solution can really make your DBA job interesting. New author Keren Ramot brings us his technique that works indepedent of the database structure.   Read more...

How many DBAs need a solution to track those changes made for multiple systems? Auditing is becoming more and more prevalent in all systems and having a good solution can really make your DBA job interesting. New author Keren Ramot brings us his technique that works indepedent of the database structure.   Read more...

As your SQL Server applications grow, chances are that you have more and more objects, especially stored procedures that you need to keep track of. An organized environment is key to being able to prevent the duplication of code and effort. Joe Sack brings us a look at how he names stored procedures to easy identification.   Read more...

New Author! Don Peterson writes his first article for us and explores why he considers XML to be...bad! There are some interesting points made here and if you've haven't thought about what XML means to you as a DBA, it's a subject worth spending some time on.   Read more...

Having a good set of naming conventions for your SQL Server objects is one of the most vital things to a company. In the long duration of a business, it saves money and time as programmers are transferred internally and don't need to relearn object names. As learning curves lower, cost lowers. This article covers some of the conventions that Brian Knight uses and why he uses them.   Read more...

Last week Andy launched a new series about Worst Practices by talking about why the Hungarian naming convention is bad for column names. This week he's at it again, declaring that the practice of having objects owned by anyone other than dbo is BAD! Agree or disagree, we think you'll enjoy reading this article and adding your thoughts to the discussion!   Read more...

This short article looks at some mistakes developers should avoid when they also have the task of designing the database, database objects, or TSQL used to access it.   Read more...

New Author! Don Peterson writes his first article for us and explores why he considers XML to be...bad! There are some interesting points made here and if you've haven't thought about what XML means to you as a DBA, it's a subject worth spending some time on.   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...

Most databases designs nowadays seem to have at least a few if not many lookup or reference tables. This article helps you define a strategy in how to design, approve, and deploy them.   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...

Last week Andy launched a new series about Worst Practices by talking about why the Hungarian naming convention is bad for column names. This week he's at it again, declaring that the practice of having objects owned by anyone other than dbo is BAD! Agree or disagree, we think you'll enjoy reading this article and adding your thoughts to the discussion!   Read more...

New columnist Gregory Larsen used to not care what his objects were called until recently when he began to become concerned with the system generated constraint names. This short article tells you why.   Read more...

This article briefly discusses SQL Server's data and procedure cache and shows you the common Transact-SQL statements/command and system tables that you can use to interact with the cache through Transact-SQL.   Read more...

In this article by Jamie Voss, he shows the methodology he used to develop his task management database.   Read more...

Version control for stored procedures isn't always popular and certainly isn't easy. Or can it be? Andy discusses a technique he used on a recent project that you might find interesting.   Read more...

Andy says it's not the greatest book for preparing for the 70-100 exam, but the case study is worth reading for it's explanation of the Microsoft Solution Framework. Read the full review!   Read more...

Should you use this book to prepare for the 70-100 exam? Read the review and find out!   Read more...