Over the years, I have witnessed many developers being confused about when to use data-manipulation language (DML) triggers vs. when to use constraints.  Read more...

When databases suddenly stop working, it can be for a number of different reasons. Human error plays a large part, of course, and the DBA needs to know what these various humans are up to. DDL triggers can help alert the DBA to unauthorized tampering with a production system, of course, but DDL triggers can't tell you everything. At some point, you will need to implement your own checks. Randy certainly reached that point!  Read more...

If you are a SQL Server DBA, you realize that the performance of cursors is not great and they should be avoided where possible. One place it is difficult to avoid cursors is individual row processing within a trigger. Amin Sobati brings us a new article that shows just how you can avoid this.   Read more...

If you are a SQL Server DBA, you realize that the performance of cursors is not great and they should be avoided where possible. One place it is difficult to avoid cursors is individual row processing within a trigger. Amin Sobati brings us a new article that shows just how you can avoid this.   Read more...

From SQL Server trainer and guru Andy Warren, he are a few short nuggets that you might not realize about triggers.  Read more...

If you are a SQL Server DBA, you realize that the performance of cursors is not great and they should be avoided where possible. One place it is difficult to avoid cursors is individual row processing within a trigger. Amin Sobati brings us a new article that shows just how you can avoid this.   Read more...

In this short demonstration, you'll learn how to use DDL database triggers to prevent changes to product and audit changes to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other change management requirements. Free registration required.   Read more...

Performance tuning is an ongoing battle in SQL Server, but having a little knowledge up front when designing an application can greatly reduce the efforts. Do you know which performs better: stored procedures or triggers? There aren't many places where the two are interchangeable, but knowing the impacts of each might change the way you build an application. Read about this analysis by Vijaya Kumar.   Read more...

Have you ever needed to audit your SQL Server 2000 database for changes to a table? A simple auditing solution is presented here by new author Tiago Silva using an INSTEAD OF trigger.   Read more...

This is the second of a two part series on how triggers work in the two latest versions of MS SQL Server. The first part dealt with what is common between the two versions. This article will detail what's been added to SQL Server 2000.   Read more...

This is a two part series on how triggers work in the two latest versions of MS SQL Server. Because there are some pretty significant additions in trigger functionality from 7.0 to 2000, we'll first need to look at what the two versions have in common. The second part to this series will look at the differences between the two MS SQL Server versions.   Read more...

Performance tuning is an ongoing battle in SQL Server, but having a little knowledge up front when designing an application can greatly reduce the efforts. Do you know which performs better: stored procedures or triggers? There aren't many places where the two are interchangeable, but knowing the impacts of each might change the way you build an application. Read about this analysis by Vijaya Kumar.   Read more...

Andy Warren started his worst practice series some time ago with the intention of looking at the worst things you can do. Given that we may not always be able to implement the best practices, at least we can try to avoid doing things harm the system or decrease performance. This article continues the series and looks at an item I see mentioned in our discussion forum quite often, triggering external events. From a trigger.   Read more...

In this article by Robert Marda, he shows you how to setup a simple auditing system through triggers.   Read more...

This articles covers a variety of techniques to let you bypass or conditionally execute code in a trigger based on criteria outside of the inserted/deleted tables. It also includes a contest that gives you a chance to win a copy of our book The Best of SQLServerCentral.com 2002!   Read more...

The columns_updated function gives you the ability to easily test to see if specific columns were modified with less code than you might otherwise need to use. In this article Andy Warren demonstrates how to create a trigger that uses this function and points out some reasons why you may NOT want to use it!   Read more...

A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!   Read more...

This article shows you one of the most time saving stored procedure built into SQL Server and then shows you how you can modify it to affect additional objects like triggers. For example, after this article and the code in the article, you'll be able to disable every trigger in your system in one line of code.   Read more...

Andy sits down with an entry level book to see if he should use it at work as a teaching aid. Did he like it? Should you buy it? Read the review now!   Read more...

This is the second of a two part series on how triggers work in the two latest versions of MS SQL Server. The first part dealt with what is common between the two versions. This article will detail what's been added to SQL Server 2000.   Read more...

From SQL Server trainer and guru Andy Warren, he are a few short nuggets that you might not realize about triggers.  Read more...

When databases suddenly stop working, it can be for a number of different reasons. Human error plays a large part, of course, and the DBA needs to know what these various humans are up to. DDL triggers can help alert the DBA to unauthorized tampering with a production system, of course, but DDL triggers can't tell you everything. At some point, you will need to implement your own checks. Randy certainly reached that point!  Read more...

Over the years, I have witnessed many developers being confused about when to use data-manipulation language (DML) triggers vs. when to use constraints.  Read more...