http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Articles tagged Programming, SQL Server 7, 2000, Miscellaneous posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)Free SQL Server 2000 Encryption for your data!!! Author Michael Coles has put together a tolljit and some XPs that you can use to encrypt your data with the Blowfish algorithm. It is hard to write good applications that encrpyt data and manage the keys and security. This will give you a great headstart on protecting your data. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/freeencryption/1980/2008/04/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/freeencryption/1980/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/Free SQL Server 2000 Encryption for your data!!! Author Michael Coles has put together a tolljit and some XPs that you can use to encrypt your data with the Blowfish algorithm. It is hard to write good applications that encrpyt data and manage the keys and security. This will give you a great headstart on protecting your data. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/freeencryption/1980/2008/04/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/freeencryption/1980/DTS is a fantastic ETL tool and it is often used to import Excel documents. However this can be a manual process in many cases in setting up the package. New author Sloan Holliday brings us a way that you can leverage Office XP's automation facilities and XML to import data into SQL Server. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/DTS/leveragingxpexcelxmlandopenxmlfordataimports/2134/2005/11/22http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/DTS/leveragingxpexcelxmlandopenxmlfordataimports/2134/Auditing SQL Server, or any system, is not an easy task and with new regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, it is becoming a full time job in some environments. Chad Miller brings us a way that he developed with Excel and some scripting to automate some of the security information for a large installation of SQL Servers. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/usesqldmoandexceltoquicklycreatereportsforauditors/2064/2005/10/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/usesqldmoandexceltoquicklycreatereportsforauditors/2064/SQL Server 2000 replication is the easiest so far to setup and work with. However there are some areas that you can get yourself into trouble with if you are not careful. New author Chris Rock brings us a few lessons learned in getting replication working with a remote office. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/adventuresinreplication/2013/2005/08/22http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/adventuresinreplication/2013/It has not been clear to what extent fragmentation, either internal or external, truly affects the performance of your SQL Server 2000 databases. New author Koby Biller discusses some of the impacts that it could have and has a free tool for download that can help you determine how fragmented your disk truly is. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning+and+Scaling/performancemonitoringbyinternalfragmentationmeasur/2014/2005/08/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning+and+Scaling/performancemonitoringbyinternalfragmentationmeasur/2014/Free SQL Server 2000 Encryption for your data!!! Author Michael Coles has put together a tolljit and some XPs that you can use to encrypt your data with the Blowfish algorithm. It is hard to write good applications that encrpyt data and manage the keys and security. This will give you a great headstart on protecting your data. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/freeencryption/1980/2008/04/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/freeencryption/1980/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/A new article from MSDN magazine on stopping SQL Injection attacks by examining how the SQL can be exploited. It's a good basic article for developers as well as DBAs who might have to review code.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1470/2004/08/20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1470/Oracle is usually a dirty word in the SQL Server community, but like it or not, lots of data resides in Oracle databases. And SQL Server is often used to gather this data together in a warehouse of some sort for spinning cubes, generating reports, etc. Haidong Ji looks at the various methods that you can connect to an Oracle driver and compares the speed of each. If you need to get data from Oracle, or may need to, this is the place you want to start. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/DTS/comparisonoforacledrivers/1430/2004/07/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/DTS/comparisonoforacledrivers/1430/Joseph gathered together some various bits of code and came up with a solution that lets you do RC4 encryption via the sp_oa~ procedures. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/rc4encryptioninastoredprocedure/1254/2004/01/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/rc4encryptioninastoredprocedure/1254/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. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning+and+Scaling/dealingwithchangingdata/1233/2003/12/19http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning+and+Scaling/dealingwithchangingdata/1233/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/This article by Jon Winer offers some tips to help you get the most of SQL Full Text Search. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/20010422025723/74/2003/09/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/20010422025723/74/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/Integrate high performance index- and search functionality in your SQL database. Essentially, IMP Index Manager is a set of tools (search engine, administrative interface, etc.) to make it very easy to add search engine capabilities to SQL Server 2000. Easy to implement, and lightening fast performance. (Not Reviewed) http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1009/2003/06/10http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1009/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/Joe has written some articles for us, he also some interesting comment on his site - this article looks at trapping errors such as timeouts or divide by zero.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/995/2003/05/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/995/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/The first part of this series provides a road map for a very cool application using an under-utilized companion of the SQL Server 2000 database platform. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/English+Query/introductiontoenglishqueryandspeechrecognition/534/2003/03/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/English+Query/introductiontoenglishqueryandspeechrecognition/534/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/