http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Content tagged Miscellaneous posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)A simple way to rename a file from within a T-SQL Script, primarily designed to add a date-time stamp. Works in 2000 and 2005.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/63094/2008/06/17http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/63094/A Sudoku solution with set based T-SQL approach utilizing binary values and operators, to ease the algorithm.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/T-SQL/62978/2008/06/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/T-SQL/62978/As much as we're SQL Server folks here, sometimes we do need to connect to other data stores. Hai shares some of his experiences doing so. Might come in handy someday. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/oracleandsqlserverdatainteroperabilityissuespart1/1332/2008/06/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/oracleandsqlserverdatainteroperabilityissuespart1/1332/Are you taking care of yourself as an IT professional? We try to cover all aspects of your SQL Server career here, not just the technical stuff. Longtime SQL Server guru Michael Coles brings us some health tips in an interview with Dr. Jerry Sanders http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3023/2008/05/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3023/Most of us DBAs have worked on our career to get where we are. A DBA is usually a second or third step in IT and we we've looked to advance our understanding of technology. Jeffrey Yao now brings us a new level of database work to which we may aspire. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2989/2008/05/09http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2989/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/This procedure works like the sp_spaceused procedure but this one shows statistics for all tables in the selected database or for all databases (excluding tempdb and model). http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62468/2008/05/02http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62468/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/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 terse script shows an easy (but "dirty" - so not advisable for production environments - rather for personal use) way to select data from stored procedure.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62463/2008/04/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62463/The procedure below deletes all records from the specified database's(except master, model, msdb and tempdb) tables (except those from the schema 'sys').http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62115/2008/04/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62115/Everyone has a set of handy utilities and tools that they use with their SQL Server, but sometimes convincing an employer to purchase tools is hard. Longtime DBA David Bird brings us a list of the tools he likes to use and are FREE. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2959/2008/04/10http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2959/What is the fastest way to update a newly created column in a large table? New author Bimal Fernando brings us a look at a technique he uses for just this situation. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2954/2008/04/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2954/Created view displays all text columns' collations in the current database with the information whether the collation is different from the database's one.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62042/2008/04/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62042/This procedure generates a dataset with combinations of elements_to_select taken from number_of_values element set. It prints also the prepared query. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62041/2008/04/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62041/The script shows one of ways generating number sequence - this one uses CTEhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62184/2008/03/31http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62184/Dice.com recently completed a salary survey for 2007. If you didn't participate, Steve Jones summarizes the results for DBAs. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2935/2008/03/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2935/This procedure prepares a query for generating permutations of n-numbers set and executes it.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62164/2008/03/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62164/Importing data files is always a challenge for a DBA, especially when the files might vary in format. Having one codebase is important and new author Mark Balasundram brings us the template for a high performance application to do just that. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2925/2008/03/13http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2925/This procedure searches for a specified text in all (or one selected) databases in all (or selected) tables.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62066/2008/03/12http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62066/SQL Server 2005 has greatly expanded the XML capabilities of this platform, but should you use it in your database? New author and MVP Simon Munro brings us a look at how he has used XML and where it might fit in your database. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2920/2008/03/11http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2920/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/This procedure searches for the specified GUID (or its part) in all (or selected one) databaseshttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62060/2008/03/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62060/As a SQL Server DBA or developer, how do you measure the success of your projects? What about your users? Here is an interesting look by Janet Wong at a few of her projects and how their success was perceived. See if any of your experiences are similar. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2892/2008/02/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2892/This script shows one on ways of generating permutations.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62030/2008/02/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62030/These examples show how You can circumvent the problem with not working TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY in views.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62044/2008/02/22http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/62044/Have you ever wanted to ensure that keywords in your data are easily searchable? Have you struggled with full-text search? New author Michael Ahmadi brings us an interesting idea for a keyword tracking and searching subsystem based on T-SQL and triggers. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2875/2008/02/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2875/When automating administrative actions for SQL Server, there are a number of ways to handle the workflow. Longtime SQL Server DBA Roy Carlson brings us a technique for using a text file as input to the standard SQL Server tools. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2801/2008/01/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2801/This script maps the primary key - foreign key relations regardless if the column names are the same or not.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/61481/2008/01/10http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/Miscellaneous/61481/Computer professionals are constantly complaining about the documentation for the software they use. And are notorious for not documenting their own code very well. Longtime author Raj Vasant brings us a short article with some suggestions on how to go about documenting your databases. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2784/2008/01/02http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2784/