http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Articles tagged Administering, SQL Server 7, 2000, Programming posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)This article discusses why VBScript should be one of the tools you use to manage your server. Sample scripts show how to remove files over x days old and how to FTP files. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/2008/03/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/How do you easily copy DTS packages from one server to another? DTS, BCP, T-SQL? Are there advantages to using one method over another? Andy did some research - read the article and see what works and what doesn't! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/copyingdtspackagestoadifferentserver/638/2006/05/05http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/copyingdtspackagestoadifferentserver/638/Do you know the difference between a login and a user? What's the best way to add them; Enterprise Manager, T-SQL, or SQL-DMO? In this beginner level article Andy demonstrates how to use all three methods to add logins and users and offers his view of which is the best technique. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/loginsusersandrolesgettingstarted/514/2005/09/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/loginsusersandrolesgettingstarted/514/Article number four in this popular series continues exposing Worst Practices! This week Andy continues his tirade by talking about why case sensitive databases should be BANNED from the planet. Is he right or just OUT OF CONTROL? Read the article and join the discussion - your comment may lead to an article, that's what generated this one! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/worstpracticesmakingdatabasescasesensitiveoranythi/489/2005/07/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/worstpracticesmakingdatabasescasesensitiveoranythi/489/This article discusses why VBScript should be one of the tools you use to manage your server. Sample scripts show how to remove files over x days old and how to FTP files. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/2008/03/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sqlmaintenanceplans/663/2005/03/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sqlmaintenanceplans/663/Mindy explores the metadata stored in SQL 2000 to show you how to produce a simple and useful data dictionary! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/datadictionaryfromwithinsqlserver2000/607/2005/02/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/datadictionaryfromwithinsqlserver2000/607/We saw a note from Chad about a tool he wrote in the forums and asked him to write up some notes. Not only did we get notes, we got the source code! See what a DBA can do with some DMO. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/dumpsqlpermissions/1314/2004/03/17http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/dumpsqlpermissions/1314/This is one of the vendors we met at PASS 2003. Their new driver is supposed to be faster than the driver provided by Microsoft AND supports NT authentication. Link takes you to a comparision chart of features. (Not Reviewed)http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1206/2003/12/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1206/One of our favorite authors is back with a great how-to on log shipping. This isn't the baked in log shipping, this is a code your own solution that gives you a starting point for your situation. Even if you don't need it now, it's worth looking at to gain a better understanding of how shipping works. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/customlogshipping/1201/2003/11/26http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/customlogshipping/1201/This article discusses why VBScript should be one of the tools you use to manage your server. Sample scripts show how to remove files over x days old and how to FTP files. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/2008/03/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingvbscripttoautomatetasks/1171/Another product review! Chris put AdeptSQL (a schema comparison and sync product) to work and wrote up the results. This article also includes some feedback from the vendor that is worth reading. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/reviewofadeptsql/1173/2003/11/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/reviewofadeptsql/1173/Andy returns to the Worst Practice series this week with a short article looking at how connection strings in applications affect what you see in sysprocesses. Perhaps less controversial (in our opinion) that some of the other worst practices, this is something easy to fix and definitely worth fixing! Read the article and post a comment - explore other points of view! Readers posting a comment will be entered in a drawing for a copy of the SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/worstpracticebadconnectionstringsandbadinfoinsyspr/802/2003/08/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/worstpracticebadconnectionstringsandbadinfoinsyspr/802/Andy has been busy lately on a project you'll be hearing more about soon (!), but he did manage to get part four of his managing jobs series done. This article discusses ideas for patterns to follow when building jobs, including writing to the console, setting errorlevels, and how to get them installed on the server. DBA's, if you're not developers, look at this article - this is stuff you can take to your development team and get better/more manageable jobs. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart4/1037/2003/06/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart4/1037/Another new author! Gheorge shares some ideas about importing event logs and using OLAP to analyze the results. Not a bad idea at all. How many of use OLAP as often as we should? Read the article, see if it's something you want to try - and let Gheorge know what you think! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/importingandanalyzingeventlogs/997/2003/05/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/importingandanalyzingeventlogs/997/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.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/982/2003/05/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/982/This article looks at change management from the perspective of the DBA, including how to use source control to your advantage and planning for 'self-healing' apps.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/changemanagement/939/2003/03/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/changemanagement/939/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. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart3/936/2003/03/11http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart3/936/Do you know the difference between a login and a user? What's the best way to add them; Enterprise Manager, T-SQL, or SQL-DMO? In this beginner level article Andy demonstrates how to use all three methods to add logins and users and offers his view of which is the best technique. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/loginsusersandrolesgettingstarted/514/2005/09/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/loginsusersandrolesgettingstarted/514/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! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart2/919/2003/02/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart2/919/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. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart1/906/2003/01/31http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/managingjobspart1/906/Andy had a semi-disaster similar to the one he wrote about last year. Interesting to see the kinds of problems that happen to other people. This article raises some interesting points that are outside the scope of basic disaster recovery, looking at how/when to move databases to a different server and how to reduce the server load dynamically. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/anotherdisasteralmost/881/2003/01/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/anotherdisasteralmost/881/Andy takes a look at the new book on DMO and likes what he sees - "great book for beginner and intermediate DMO users!". We've been supporters of DMO for a while and we're glad to see a new book on the subject. Read the review, add your comments, buy the book! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/reviewofrealworldsqldmo/842/2002/11/19http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/reviewofrealworldsqldmo/842/Andy relates some info he got from Wes Grant about his freeware and open source project to build a web based admin tool for SQL that is currently in the design/initial coding phase. Get the scoop and maybe write some of the code too! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/opensourceaspenterprisemanagerindesignphase/824/2002/10/22http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/opensourceaspenterprisemanagerindesignphase/824/If you've been with us for a while you know that Andy started a series last year on worst practices. As he says, maybe you can't always do best practices, but at least dont do the worst ones. Read the article and add a comment, participate! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/worstpracticesortingbyordinal/811/2002/10/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/worstpracticesortingbyordinal/811/Following up on a question posted in our discussion area, Andy looks at how to use DMO to add and remove linked servers. Along the way he points out a couple 'gotchas' and throws in a cool tip about how to save a little time when you experiment with DMO. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/addinglinkedserversusingsqldmo/801/2002/09/19http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/addinglinkedserversusingsqldmo/801/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. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/thecaseforsqlloginsparttwo/780/2002/08/19http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/thecaseforsqlloginsparttwo/780/Andy says Windows Authentication "is bad". What? That's not what Microsoft says! Heck, that's not even what we say! Everyone knows NT authentication is the way to go. Then again, when was the last time Andy wrote an article that wasn't worth reading?! Read the article, rate it and add a comment - and automatically be entered in a drawing for a copy of SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning donated by Microsoft Press. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/thecaseforsqlloginspart1/714/2002/06/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/thecaseforsqlloginspart1/714/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. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/versioncontrolforstoredprocedures/681/2002/05/10http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/versioncontrolforstoredprocedures/681/Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sqlmaintenanceplans/663/2005/03/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sqlmaintenanceplans/663/