http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Articles posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)Some useful undocumented extended and stored procedures in SQL Server 2005http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Stored+Procedures/62868/2008/05/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Stored+Procedures/62868/Two weeks ago Andy started his wildly successful series on Worst Practices. This week he continues that series discussing why failing to use primary keys and clustered indexes are worst practices. Agree or disagree, read the article and join the discussion. One thing you'll have to admit, reading an article by Andy is a lot more interesting than reading Books Online! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/worstpracticesnotusingprimarykeysandclusteredindex/488/2008/05/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/worstpracticesnotusingprimarykeysandclusteredindex/488/Often developers are tasked with not only developing functional code, but also with ensuring that the code they develop scales well and performs in the application environment.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62908/2008/05/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62908/How to use XML to pass Multi-Select parameters from Reporting Services to SQL Server.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Reporting+Services/62731/2008/05/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Reporting+Services/62731/The need to test a program that accesses and manipulates a back-end SQL Server® database is very common. In many such cases, the application interacts with the back-end data through the use of SQL stored procedures. In this type of scenario, you can think of the stored procedures as auxiliary methods of the system under test; and they must therefore be tested just like any other module in the system.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62915/2008/05/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62915/In this article we will share some of the common reasons for slow-running queries and what your approach should be for identifying and fixing them. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62917/2008/05/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62917/Many people have used a "Numbers" or "Tally" table without really knowing what it does. This is an introduction as to how a Tally table replaces a loop.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/TSQL/62867/2008/05/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/TSQL/62867/This article explores the options available in SQL Server 2005 for Slowly Changing Dimensions.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62911/2008/05/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62911/Over the past few years, software developers have used various kinds of technologies to retrieve data from relational databases. SQL Server 2000 is the first Microsoft DBMS to fully support XML. In this article the author concentrates on the FOR XML clause in SQL Server versions, 2000 and 2005. Click on title for morehttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62916/2008/05/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62916/A unique solution that allows Reporting Services to easily publish information from your SQL Server Error logs.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Reporting+Services/62934/2008/05/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Reporting+Services/62934/ SQL Server source code analysis and management add database security by debugging and testing SQL applications. Learn about SQL source code analysis.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62905/2008/05/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62905/Learn what a Dates table is and how to create one, and then try it out for yourselfhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62914/2008/05/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62914/SQL 2008 has some key improvements over SQL 2005. This article deals with backup compression and faster backups in SQL 2008http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Compression/62746/2008/05/05http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Compression/62746/Part 15 of this series examines what cost is paid when tables are separated into multiple databases on the same server.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62902/2008/05/05http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62902/In this article, David Leibowitz compares the performance of the prerelease of Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services to SSRS 2005. While it is clear performance improvements have been made for report automation, developers might have differing opinions on the new Report Designer.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62907/2008/05/05http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62907/You can manage SSAS objects using AMO and SSIS which enables you to have detailed control of SSAS Administrative tasks.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SSIS/62795/2008/05/02http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SSIS/62795/This document describes how Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can be applied to common business problems. This document assumes some familiarity with MDX.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62567/2008/05/02http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62567/New Author! Don Peterson writes his first article for us and explores why he considers XML to be...bad! There are some interesting points made here and if you've haven't thought about what XML means to you as a DBA, it's a subject worth spending some time on. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/isxmltheanswer/1147/2008/05/02http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/isxmltheanswer/1147/One of the issues you'll face with SQL Server is blocking which is caused by other processes that are holding locks on objects. Until the locks are removed on an object the next process will wait before proceeding. This is a common process that runs within SQL Server to ensure data integrity, but depending on how transactions are run this can cause some issues. Are there ways to get around blocking by using different indexes to cover the queries that may be running?http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62913/2008/05/02http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62913/This article presents a way to implement a simple database synchronization solution similar to log shipping using Database Maintenance Plans and T-SQL.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Log+Shipping/62676/2008/05/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Log+Shipping/62676/The PASS Summit is being held in Seattle on November 18-21, 2008. Read about a few of the reasons that you might want to ask your boss if you can go.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQLServerCentral.com/62979/2008/05/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQLServerCentral.com/62979/Set up SQL Server 2005 Service Broker for a messaging platform to queue data of stored procedures and functions. Configure Service Broker with these steps.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62904/2008/05/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62904/This article looks at the new Management Data Warehouse (MDW) that is incorporated into SQL Server 2008. This warehouse is performance analysis and capacity planning tool for DBAs. This article will discuss the basic architecture of the MDW and how to set it up using a wizard.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62910/2008/05/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62910/Sometimes the tools that Microsoft provides us with do not give us complete control over the organization of our environment. Such is the case with organizing SQL Agent Jobs. We are able to organize and sort jobs by a variety of factors:http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62912/2008/04/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62912/Recent installments of this series have demonstrated SQL Server 2005 Express Edition's replication characteristics by taking advantage of replication-specific executables and T-SQL code combined with Windows Synchronization Manager and Web Synchronization technologies. This article explores another method of reaching the same goal, which involves Replication Management Objects (RMO).http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62901/2008/04/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62901/This article describes and demonstrates the problem of using asterisk to select all fields from a table within a table function.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/UDF/62730/2008/04/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/UDF/62730/Building an application with modular programming not only speeds development, but can make for a more stable application. New author Sreeju Jumar brings us a look at how you can further modularize your stored procedures.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Stored+Procedures/62935/2008/04/29http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Stored+Procedures/62935/Learn how to build robust Matrix-style reports in SQL Server Reporting Services. These advanced reporting techniques make it easier to build a fully-functional report.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62906/2008/04/29http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62906/In Reporting Services in SQL Server 2005 there are several ways of achieving the same result. This article introduces how we can create the same report using several different methods.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62909/2008/04/29http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62909/Greg Larsen looks at one way to design your database connection strategy to simplify changing application connections so you can plug-n-play databases with less administrative overhead when the need arises.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62900/2008/04/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62900/