Encryption of data at rest is becoming more and more crucial in today’s world. This tip is aimed to help businesses that do not have the budgets or resources to purchase hardware encryption tools or to upgrade to SQL 2008. It basically illustrates how to achive transparent file encryption with SQL 2005 or SQL 2000.  Read more...

Some useful undocumented extended and stored procedures in SQL Server 2005  Read more...

Every so often I see a post in a forum or on Twitter about the use of xp_cmdshell. Usually it is someone looking for...  Read more...

The seventh volume in this collection brings you a compilation of the best articles we've seen over the past year, from over 50 authors.   Read more...

Loading EBCDIC data into SQL Server is not a well documented process - this article provides a very useful guide to optimizing the performance of this operation.  Read more...

Welcome back to our last class this term on security in SQL Server here at SQL University. According to the syllabus,...  Read more...

Unexpected Consistency Checks, Troubleshooting Memory Usage, More from Paul Randal.  Read more...

Build List Updated with Cumulative Update 16 for SP2 and CU 6 for SP3.   Read more...

Someone was asking about using multiple data files recently to try and increase performance. I had answered that unless you...  Read more...

Integration Services is a great ETL tool, allowing you to build complex and dynamic transformations. New author Marie Deschene brings us a  Read more...

SQL Server Management Studio provides a wizard to generate script out of a database. Learn how to automate the process to generate and store the database script.  Read more...

In continuing with our series of tips on Best Practices for SQL Server I'm turning my sights on Maintenance. Specifically in this tip we will be discussing Index maintenance: when, if, why, and how are questions that will be addressed.  Read more...

With SQL Server 2005 DMVs, we can easily find query performance statistics. Every DBA has a favorite script to find query performance stats. I also have one. But, are all the queries captured by the DMVs? In this tip I will walk through capturing some of this data and show what is capture and what is not captured by the DMVs.  Read more...

Often someone will try to perform a delete on a large number of records and run into a number of problems. Slow performance, log growth, and more. Lynn Pettis shows us how to better handle this situation in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005  Read more...

In case you are considering to apply SQL Server SP3 CU5 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972511) to your system, I'd like to point out one issue / bug we found with CU5.  Read more...

One DBA's tale of how to monitor jobs for failure and ensure that the DBA is alerted to the fact that there is a problem. (from Feb 2008)  Read more...

Tim Mitchell presented at SQLSaturday #17 on Scripting in SSIS. I thought it was a really interesting presentation, and I’m...  Read more...

A Failing cluster installation because of too many processors. Sander Stad explains how you might be able to solve this in your environment.  Read more...

You probably already know that SQL Server 2005 SP2 has been released. This is a good thing if you are in need of one of the changes that are included in this service pack. In a previous tip, SQL Server 2005 - Service Pack 2, we took a look at what was to be included in this second service pack for SQL Server 2005. The question that you often face is should I install this service pack. One thing to note before you install SP2 is that there is no way to uninstall it once it is installed.   Read more...

From monitoring e-mail messages to distributing reports for users, SQL Server's database mail proves quite useful. Learn how to use it in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005/2008.   Read more...

This article is the beginner's guide to Default Trace. The article outlines how to query the default trace for key trace events, with a focus on DDL history.  Read more...

With SQL Server 2005 DMVs, we can easily find query performance statistics. Every DBA has a favorite script to find query performance stats. I also have one. But, are all the queries captured by the DMVs? In this tip I will walk through capturing some of this data and show what is capture and what is not captured by the DMVs.  Read more...

Build List Updated with Cumulative Update 16 for SP2 and CU 6 for SP3.   Read more...