Reporting Services makes building rich reports easy, including images and fancy layouts, with a nice wizard. But adding in background images is a little more complex and Andy Warren brings us a quick tutorial for SQL Server 2005's Reporting Services   Read more...

Tired of creating templates in SQL Server Reporting Services? Learn how to maintain reusable Reporting Services templates in SQL Server 2005 using BIDS.  Read more...

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.   Read more...

One of the nice new features in SQL Server 2005 is the ability to partition a table based on some sort of range in the data. New author Irfan Baig brings us a short article that explains exactly how you can get started using this new feature.   Read more...

If you are forced to nod wisely and keep silent when Reporting Services is mentioned, now is the time to turn ignorance into wisdom, with the help of yet another Simple Talk Cribsheet!   Read more...

Reporting Services is a very handy way to get your SQL Server 2005 data out to end users quickly. It is included with your license and provides a great development environment for reports. New author Adriaan Davel brings us a quick technique for ensuring that multi-select parameters are handled correctly.   Read more...

One of the techniques that you can use for increasing performance, especially in large SQL Server tables, is partitioning. Andy Warren brings us an overview of what this is and how you can use it in your SQL Server 2005 applications.   Read more...

Concurrency and transaction isolation are a prickly subject, difficult to explain with any kind of clarity without boring the reader and leaving their poor brain in a complete muddle. Therefore, it is often ignored in the vain hope it won't affect us and we can forget all about it. Well you can't ignore it any more and with SQL Server 2005 there's a whole new isolation level added to the four that already exist.  Read more...

This article discusses: How SQL injection attacks work, Testing for vulnerabilities, Validating user input, and more.  Read more...

A synonym is a new object to SQL Server 2005. It is a way to give an alias to an already existing object. For example, if you have a table named SalesHistoryFromArchiveF  Read more...

This tip explores a DMX extension introduced in SQL Server 2005 SP2 that can be used to render lift reports directly in Reporting Services.  Read more...

Reporting Services is one of the most popular features of SQL Server 2005 and there have been a tremendous number of enhancements to this subsystem. New author Bilal Khawaja brings us a look at dynamic connection strings and how you can have one report pulling data from different servers.   Read more...

SQL Server 2005 has so many new features that in my opinion if you read only BOL for a year you'd find something new every day. One of those is Multiple Active Result Sets or MARS. Multiple Active Result Sets is a new SQL Server 2005 feature that, putting it simply, allows the user to run more than one SQL batch on an open connection at the same time.  Read more...

Reporting Services has been greatly enhanced in SQL Server 2005 and become an integral tool in many SQL Server installations. Longtime autor Raj Vasant brings us an example of how you can enhance your reports with custom coded DLLs called from within the reporting engine.   Read more...

Reporting Services is one of the most widely used subsystems in SQL Server and there have been some very creative solutions invented by DBAs around the world. New author Carolyn Richardson is one of those, bringing us a implementation that tracks uptime and disk space for her SQL Servers   Read more...

The next evoution of T-SQL, which will be released in SQL Server 2005, contains a number of enhancements designed to allow you to write more powerful queries while keeping the code structured in a way that makes development and understanding it easier. Coming ever so closer to the SQL-99 specification with Common Table Expressions, new author Srinivas Sampath brings us an introduction to this new way of writing complex queries.   Read more...

Grant Fritchey steps into the workbench arena, with an example-fuelled examination of catching and gracefully handling errors in SQL 2000 and 2005, including worked examples of the new TRY..CATCH capabilities.  Read more...

What is the page size in SQL Server 2005? That's an easy question, but what is the maximum row size? They're not the same thing and ANdy Warren shows you why.   Read more...

Reporting Services has proven to be one of the more useful subsystems of SQL Server. However the standard editions of both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 have limitations with regard to the subscription features. Jason Selberg brings us an updated version of his code for extending the subscription feature.   Read more...

Arthur Fuller recently instructed a colleague on how to automate the process of trimming table data in SQL Server 2005. Find out how he is able to turn an onerous task into a breeze.  Read more...