One of the few things that SQL Server does not automatically help you with is the design of your tales, views, and other database objects. Having standards and design techniques can greatly ease the maintenance of your schema as well as ease the transition to having others work with the database. New author J.D. Gonzalez brings us some of his naming techniques to keep things organized.   Read more...

One of the few things that SQL Server does not automatically help you with is the design of your tales, views, and other database objects. Having standards and design techniques can greatly ease the maintenance of your schema as well as ease the transition to having others work with the database. New author J.D. Gonzalez brings us some of his naming techniques to keep things organized.   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...

One of the few things that SQL Server does not automatically help you with is the design of your tales, views, and other database objects. Having standards and design techniques can greatly ease the maintenance of your schema as well as ease the transition to having others work with the database. New author J.D. Gonzalez brings us some of his naming techniques to keep things organized.   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...

The second part of Steve Jones' series on coding standards within SQL Server.   Read more...

Andy starts a new series about Worst Practices - come find out why and read about the first one on his list - using Hungarian Notation for column names!   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 week we have another article from Andy that discusses some changes he made at work in conjunction with clustering all his database servers. Not a how-to, just comments about what was changed and why. Worth reading just for the reminder about the potential gotcha that @@ServerName can represent.   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...

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...

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...

The second part of Steve Jones' series on coding standards within SQL Server.   Read more...

Andy starts a new series about Worst Practices - come find out why and read about the first one on his list - using Hungarian Notation for column names!   Read more...

Identity columns are last years news. Have you experimented with uniqueindentifiers - better known to programmers as GUID's? Guaranteed to be unique in the world, they offer a powerful alternative to identity columns.   Read more...

Learn the key basics of writing quality Transact-SQL code.   Read more...