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...

Continuing on with a look at SQL Server 205 partitioning features, Andy Warren delves into archiving techniques.   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...

Every SQL Server developer has a preferred method of doing things; mine is what I call molecular queries. These are queries assembled from atomic queries; by which, I mean that they address exactly one table. By combing atoms, I can create molecules.   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...

SQL Server can grow to encompass hundreds of databases on a single server, each having hundreds or thousands of objects within it. A truly scalable RDBMS. However, how many times have you been searching through the Object Browser in QA or the left pane in Enterprise Manager searching for an object? New Author Ashish Kaushal gives us a method to easily search your server for that long lost object.   Read more...

Storing passwords in SQL Server for authentication by your application is a common practice. But not always a good one. Someone with access could easily see all passwords and perhaps cause mischief inside your application. Imagine the office gossip getting access to your HR application as the HR director! Not a good thing. Dinesh Asanka has written a short piece on how you can use a built in function in SQL Server to encrypt these passwords and use them with a minimum of effort.   Read more...

Sysforeignkeys is a valuable SQL Server resource. How many times have you had to "pick up the pieces" from a database developed by someone else and dropped on your desk? Ever get a database diagram with that? A data dictionary? Probably not too often. Jeffrey Yao has developed a system of finding those parent-child relationships automatically and displaying them so he can get up to speed quickly on these inherited databases. Read on to find out more.   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...

This month Robert covers the process he uses for developing stored procedures. In many ways it reflects how software is developed, but it does have it's minor differences. This is a high level process discussion, not a line by line example of the entire process - by design of course.   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...

Greg returns with an article based on some practical experience using QA templates to save time and work. Good examples, good work through, good idea!   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...

Quite a while back Andy wrote an article about why not using primary keys and clustered indexes was a worst practice. Chris weighs in this week with a great article that gives some more in depth info on clustered indexes and why he thinks they should be used on every table.   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...

In this follow up to one of our most popular articles, Andy responds to comments posted by readers and discusses how to manage SQL logins effectively in your applications.   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 follow up article Andy looks at how maintenance plans report errors and how they actually accomplish what they do. A little snooping with Profiler reveals all!   Read more...