The third article in a four part series, this week Andy shows how to use the command object to work with stored procedure parameters.   Read more...

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

Are you using default values for your parameters? Using named parameters when you call the proc or passing the values by ordinal? Should you be? Andy thinks 6 out of 10 of our readers will agree with his point of view, we'll be a little more conservative and guess that 5 of out 10 will be closer.   Read more...

Following up on a question posted in our discussion area, Andy demonstrates how to backup/restore a database using DMO, how to get the list of files to be restored, and how to do a restore with no recovery. Lots of sample code!   Read more...

In this article Andy looks at one way you can separate your presentation code from your data when you generate HTML tables for simple reports. Lots of code examples so you can see how it works.   Read more...

Programmers can most commonly relate to interface-based programming in their programming language. This is harder to accomplish in SQL Server though. In this article by Chris Cubley, he shows you how to build interfaced-based SQL.   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...

Architectural choices for data access affect performance, scalability, maintainability, and usability. This article focuses on the performance aspects of these choices by comparing relative performance of various data access techniques, including Microsoft® ADO.NET Command, DataReader, DataSet, and XML Reader in common application scenarios with a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database.  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 sample is provided in conjunction with the MSDN Magazine article, "SQL Server 2000 and XML: Developing XML-Enabled Data Solutions for the Web." This article presents and compares five data access approaches, using a variety of technologies including ASP and ADO, XSLT, and DirectXML. Once built, the solutions are compared on the basis of their speed and efficiency.   Read more...

The third article in a four part series, this week Andy shows how to use the command object to work with stored procedure parameters.   Read more...

This article demonstrates how to retrieve a single record from SQL Server by using the IRow interface with a singleton SELECT. The main purpose for this technique is to avoid the overhead of creating a recordset when you are fetching a single record. Because no recordset is actually created, only one read-only ADODB.Record is returned. This is true even if the specified SELECT results in multiple records being returned if a normal ADODB.Recordset is used.   Read more...

This article presents a method of outputting the results of a query as a tab delimited text file using COM.   Read more...

Ever have a large batch of scripts you need to run? It takes a while if you have to open each one in Query Analyzer and execute it. One of our readers proposed an alternative - take a look the small app Andy Warren wrote to make doing this task a breeze.   Read more...