http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Content tagged Configuring posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)Sizing a database can be one of the most arduous tasks a DBA, analyst or developer must attend to. It?s time consuming and more hours go into analyzing the database than actually sizing it. This article focuses on how to monitor the database?s growth after its deployed and contains some tips on how to size it before deployment. We will also dive a little into how to benchmark your database against a robust data load. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sizingadatabase/383/2006/06/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sizingadatabase/383/Learn about SQL Server memory needs and settings including RAM amounts, how to enable AWE, maximum server memory and the differences of 32- and 64-bit platforms.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62299/2008/03/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/62299/What's the best way to change the default backup directory for a server, using SSMS or Enterprise Manager, without changing all the default directories at the same time? What is the TSQL to do it? A prize for the best correct solution.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2948/2007/04/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2948/The SQL Server tools are top notch and often other platforms attempt to duplicate their handiness. Enterprise Manager is one that every DBA uses and it can perform a myriad of functions to configure your server. Read this new article by Dale Elizabeth Corey that looks that the wide range of items in the Configuration Properties of this tool. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/exploringsqlserver2000configurationproperties/1493/2006/09/29http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/exploringsqlserver2000configurationproperties/1493/Sizing a database can be one of the most arduous tasks a DBA, analyst or developer must attend to. It?s time consuming and more hours go into analyzing the database than actually sizing it. This article focuses on how to monitor the database?s growth after its deployed and contains some tips on how to size it before deployment. We will also dive a little into how to benchmark your database against a robust data load. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sizingadatabase/383/2006/06/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/sizingadatabase/383/Attaching and detaching databases is old hat these days right? Do you know how to reattach a database that has more than 16 files? Or do you know what happens if you try to reattach a database that had two log files but one is missing/deleted? And even if you know the answer to that - do you know how to fix it without restoring from backup? Maybe it's not ALL old hat just yet! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/attachanddetachagain/656/2006/06/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/attachanddetachagain/656/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/Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2000 is huge. There are significant changes in it and they apply to all three products: the core SQL Server, MSDE, and Analysis Services. Because there are so many changes, this first article in the series will only focus on the security changes. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Service+Packs/sp3coresecurity/907/2005/12/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Service+Packs/sp3coresecurity/907/In part one Chris Kempster covered a variety of security recommendations primarily for production systems. In Part two of this series he continues to explore security at a variety of levels where you may not realize you are vulnerable. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/securitypart2/593/2005/11/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/securitypart2/593/As a DBA you do not need to know how to setup an Active Directory domain or a DNS server, but you still need to know how Kerberos, Service Principle Names, and hostnames are used to perform integrated authentication to a SQL Server. This article by new columnist Chad Miller shows you some of the more integral parts of troubleshooting running Windows Authentication security in a SQL Server environmnet. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/cannotgeneratesspicontext/929/2005/08/19http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/cannotgeneratesspicontext/929/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 concentrates on using Full Text Search to query text located inside Microsoft Office documents. In previous articles, Microsoft Search was introduced as an add-on service to enable advanced text queries. Catalogs, the physical storage units for search, were created and indexed. The TSQL keywords CONTAINS, FORMSOF, and INFLECTIONAL were used to query the newly created Catalogs. Population Schedules along with Change Tracking options were discussed as methods to keep the Catalogs up to date with the underlying database.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1782/2005/03/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1782/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/In the previous month's articles, Full Text Searching was introduced as a way to query strings with more refinement than the usual TSQL "like" or equal operator statements. With Full Text Searching, a new file system structure is created, storing key words from selected fields into Catalogs. In addition to storing typical character fields from databases, Microsoft Office documents that have been saved as binaries can also be entered into the Catalogs. In this month's edition, we will begin with the maintenance issues required to keep these Catalogs current. Once created, these catalogs can be interrogated for key words that are near each other's proximity, the singular and plural versions of a word, or the noun and verb variations of a word. In addition, search result rankings, or weights, that usually accompany internet search engine returns can also be requested. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1710/2005/02/10http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1710/In last month's article, Full Text Searching was introduced as a way to query strings with more refinement than the usual TSQL "like" or equal operator statements. With Full Text Searching, a new file system structure is created, storing key words from selected fields into Catalogs. In addition to storing typical character fields from databases, Microsoft Office documents that have been saved as binaries can also be entered into the Catalogs. Once created, these catalogs can be interrogated for key words that are near each other's proximity, the singular and plural versions of a word, or the noun and verb variations of a word can all be searched for. In addition, search result rankings, or weights, that usually accompany internet search engine returns can also be requested.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1711/2005/02/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1711/Full Text Searching is a free, optional component of MS SQL 2000. When installed, it offers a vast array of additional string querying abilities. Full Text Searching allows for string comparisons similar to internet search engines, returning both results and a matching score or weight. With regular TSQL, string matching is usually limited to an exact match, or a wildcard match with the keyword "LIKE." Full Text Searching exceeds this by searching for phrases, groups of words, words near one another, or different tenses of words, such as run, running, and ran. In addition, if Microsoft Office Word or Excel documents are saved in the database, their contents can be searched like a typical varchar field. Full Text Searching is accomplished by installing a new service (Microsoft Search), and using key words in TSQL designed specifically for text searching. This article will demonstrate installing, configuring and using the Full Text Search engine.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1712/2005/02/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1712/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/Every organization has a system of weekly reboots or monthly reboots etc., for all their servers. When it comes to clustered servers, the reboot cycle would be little different. Usually the active node in the cluster will always be active, unless there is a failover initiated manually or when there is a hardware failure etc. In this article, I am going to explain how to reboot cluster nodes. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1688/2005/02/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1688/In this article, Brian Kelley continues his series on Query Analyzer for SQL Server 2000. Query Analyzer offers a highly configurable integrated development environment (IDE). Some of the areas Brian looks at are how to modify the fonts and colors, set connection settings, choose scripting options, and customizing file and result set options. Learn how to make the most of the IDE and make it work for you. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/qa2k_3/740/2005/01/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/qa2k_3/740/Detailed question/answer paper on deploying SQL Server in a Storage Area Network (SAN) Environment. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1592/2005/01/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1592/On this site, we have taken a contrarian approach to looking at the ways to configure SQL Server with our Worst Practices series. However Microsoft still looks at it from the other side and release a tool called the Best Practices Analyzer for SQL Server. Author Dinesh Asanka brings us a short look at this tool. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Configuring/bestpracticesarealwaysthebest/1581/2004/11/11http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Configuring/bestpracticesarealwaysthebest/1581/The SQL Server tools are top notch and often other platforms attempt to duplicate their handiness. Enterprise Manager is one that every DBA uses and it can perform a myriad of functions to configure your server. Read this new article by Dale Elizabeth Corey that looks that the wide range of items in the Configuration Properties of this tool. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/exploringsqlserver2000configurationproperties/1493/2006/09/29http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/exploringsqlserver2000configurationproperties/1493/Good enough for your bookshelf? This one meets that requirement for Brian, click the link to find out why. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/reviewofsql2kresourcekit/1329/2004/04/13http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/reviewofsql2kresourcekit/1329/Do you have the need for more speed on your servers? How do you go about squeezing more speed out of the database when faced with an upgrade? Steve Jones walks through some of his thought process when looking at ugprade for one of his servers. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/theneedforspeedupgradingyourservers/1320/2004/03/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/theneedforspeedupgradingyourservers/1320/In part one Chris Kempster covered a variety of security recommendations primarily for production systems. In Part two of this series he continues to explore security at a variety of levels where you may not realize you are vulnerable. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/securitypart2/593/2005/11/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/securitypart2/593/Andy continues writing about replication, this week discussing the many options available when creating a snapshot publication. As we noted on his last article, this one may take longer than usual to load due the large number of images but we think the readability of having it all one page is worth while. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/snapshotreplicationforthebeginner/886/2004/01/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/snapshotreplicationforthebeginner/886/We've asked Andy to put together some articles that tackle replication from a beginner perspective, a tutorial type approach PLUS comments on what you should or should not do. This week he covers the steps needed to set up a server for replication. More images than usual so the page may take a little longer to load, but we think worthwhile so that you can see every step along the way. Let us know what you think. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/gettingreadytoreplicate/883/2004/01/20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/gettingreadytoreplicate/883/Everyone does demos. Selling software relies upon people viewing your software in action and being confident it will work. Managing a demo server can be a challenge and this series will look at different problems and options you have. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/buildingademoserver/864/2004/01/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Installation/buildingademoserver/864/Get started with using WMI (Windows Mgmt Instrumentation) by seeing two good scripts to start with, one to reboot the server, another to list all the services. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingwmi/1235/2003/12/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/usingwmi/1235/New book! This new book by Ken Henderson (author of other 'GURU' books abou SQL) promises an all inclusive approach to the internals. Sample chapters and other info available by following the link. We'll try to get a review up soon!http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1184/2003/11/17http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/1184/