http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Content tagged Strategies, Miscellaneous posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)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/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/Continuing on with a look at SQL Server 205 partitioning features, Andy Warren delves into archiving techniques. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3242/2007/10/08http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3242/SQL Server guru Andy Warren brings us a list of things that he considers when things go wrong. Read about some of the common sense approaches to solving performance and other problems. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3211/2007/10/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3211/The Sarbanes-Oxley act has drastically changed the jobs of many DBAs with the audit and reporting requirements this act entails. Brandie Tarvin brings us some hints about how you can go about complying with the new requirements. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3178/2007/10/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3178/Simon Sabin is always cagey about giving advice on the sort of hardware to run SQL Server on, but admits to some general rules. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3207/2007/09/10http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3207/Auditing is something that almost every DBA needs to tackle at some point in his or her career. David McKinney brings a new twist on the solution by using XML and XSL to help implement auditing in your SQL Server application. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/3179/2007/08/20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/3179/To run with the pack in terms of performance, productivity, and competition, servers that are long in the tooth have to be put out to pasture regularly. But there might be (and usually is) some life left in these early retirees, and they can still be put to good use.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3162/2007/08/17http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3162/How many cores (or hardware threads) can your code harness to get its answers faster?http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3165/2007/08/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3165/Service-Component Architectures (SCA) provide a programming model for implementing Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3166/2007/08/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3166/When installing a SQL Server 2005 instance on your SQL 2000 machine, there are upgrade and compability issues such as linked servers, multi-server administration and log shipping.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3115/2007/08/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3115/Managing a large number of servers can be quite the challenge for many DBAs and it seems to get worse each year as more servers are added without an increase in staffing. New author Mark Tierney brings us the first part of a series on the framework he's built to help manage his servers. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3103/2007/08/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/3103/A look at Intel and AMD architectures for the future. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3084/2007/07/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3084/Proper disk configuration can result in a lifetime of high performance for SQL Server databases. Go beyond storage capacity requirements and consider drive performance.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3071/2007/07/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3071/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/I regularly use SQLIO.EXE to gauge the maximum throughput a disk subsystem can sustain. Recently Microsoft released SQLIOSIM.EXE to provide better results for this type of test. However they didn't release any documentation on the tool and I could never figure out what it was trying to tell me. It looks like they finally did release a Knowledge Base article on SQLIOSIM. Give it a spin. I'd be curious to hear what you think of the tool. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2917/2007/03/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2917/In this article, Brian looks at how Citrix MetaFrame can use SQL Server for its internal data repository. The basic operation of SQL Server in a Citrix MetaFrame installation is covered. In addition, Brian looks at how a DBA is an integral part of the support team for a successful Citrix MetaFrame farm. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/citrix_metaframe/683/2007/03/02http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/citrix_metaframe/683/Your development system might be as valuable as your servers, but is it worth setting up with RAID? Read an interesting argument from one of the largest custom computer builder.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2857/2007/02/14http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2857/As a DBA, you can find very useful information in the Windows event logs. About important events, the health of your SQL Server and the operating system it runs on. Unfortunately, the logs also contain a lot of useless information. Some applications have a tendency to log hundreds of events every day, filling up the logs very quickly with info that you, as a DBA, do not need. But you still need to see that important message that informs you the server is going to crash if you don’t take action. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2726/2006/12/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2726/Damon Armstrong learned the hard way about the consequences of not having a clearly defined project scope or work contracthttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2655/2006/10/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2655/Database concurrency conflicts are somewhat of a plague in software development because they're hard to predict and handle. Unfortunately, they're also hard to prevent. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2617/2006/10/11http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2617/Properly sizing your SQL Server hardware and testing application loads against them is a complex and difficult topic. Anthony Bressi brings us a great new article that gives you a systematic approach to performing your own stress test. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2634/2006/10/10http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2634/Solving business problems is an interesting problem for most application developers. Usually the issues are handled in application code, but there are some places where SQL Server can be used to help. Yaroslav Pentsarskyy brings us a creative use of SQL Server functionality to prevent identity theft. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2595/2006/09/20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2595/Intrusion Detection Systems are a great tool for security, but they have suffered from information overload with security professionals struggling to dig through the data. New author Yaroslav Pentsarskyy brings us a look at how SQL Server helped him find security issues. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2558/2006/08/15http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2558/So, you're a Microsoft SQL Server administrator flirting with open source, but you're not sure how far you should go on the first migration? Don't worry, there won't be much peer pressure to go "all the way." Look around and you'll find that most businesses making the switch are going only as far as their Web applications.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2537/2006/08/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2537/One of the responsibilities of the Microsoft.com operations team is to manage the infrastructure that supports the Windows Update and Microsoft Update services, which have client bases in the hundreds of millions and growing. The Windows Update site provides critical updates, security fixes, software downloads, and device drivers for Windows operating systems. Microsoft Update is the service that brings you all the features and benefits of Windows Update. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2514/2006/07/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2514/Ensuring that your disk subsystem performs well and does not run out of space is a balancing act that many DBAs learn over time through trial and "out of space" errors. New author Arindam Banerjee takes a look at some of the things to consider when capacity planning. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/analyzingdiskcapacityforsqlserver/2467/2006/07/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/analyzingdiskcapacityforsqlserver/2467/If I had a penny for every person who said "usability is just common sense", I'd have a pretty reasonable stack of pennies – maybe 30 or so. Clearly I'm not going to be able to retire on this, but at least it demonstrates that many people have misconceptions about how usable interfaces are designed.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2471/2006/06/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2471/Gartner has stated in the past that "configuration management is at the very heart of IT service management." What do you mean by this?http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2327/2006/03/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2327/You may be wonderfully up-to-date with an AJAX Web interface or the latest whizbang Windows user interface, but under the covers, you're probably still pumping data in and out of a database, just as we all did a decade or more ago. That makes it all the more surprising that developers are still making the same database mistakes that date back to those good old days of Windows 95 and before. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2329/2006/03/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2329/