With SQL Server 2005 recently released, one of the things that many people are looking for are some guidelines for working with the new product. New author Nanda Kishore brings us a list of best practices that should give you a start.   Read more...

This paper describes the Fuzzy Lookup and Fuzzy Grouping transformations that are part of SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS). These SSIS transformations are useful for improving the data quality of existing data as well as new data that is being loaded into your database.  Read more...

Understanding different types of failovers/Role Switching and How do they internally work in database mirroring.  Read more...

SQL Server expert Jeff Moden discusses a common problem seen in many update statements.  Read more...

This article will show you how to use the sys.dm_exec_cached_plans DMV to monitor the performance of stored procedures  Read more...

One common problem in querying is to reference the previous row in a data set as part of a calculation. David McKinney brings us an interesting solution using SQL Server 2005.  Read more...

Discover how to use metadata for pooling information already resident in an application to create a flexible search interface that reduces complexity and increases users' productivity.  Read more...

The Data Generator Source is now available for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. This component needs little explanation. It generates random integer (DT_I4) and string (DT_WSTR) data and places them in the pipeline.   Read more...

The next installment of Jacob Sebastian's great series on XML looks at how a .NET application might consume XML data returned from SQL Server.  Read more...

When designing a database, we sometimes come across situations where there are multiple types of entities that we are modeling, but we'd like them to all have certain attributes or relations in common. Using "sub-type" tables is a simple way to implement table inheritance in SQL Server.  Read more...

Several methods on how to pass an array of values from a client to SQL Server, and performance data about the methods.  Read more...

When is it okay to let SQL Server to make a statistic for columns in your queries, and when should you take those statistics and make an index out of them? What I do is to test all of my procs, and if they generate system statistics (_WA_SYS%), then I add an index to the table for the column in the statistic. But is this a good practice?  Read more...

In this article Dinesh Priyankara describes how schema comparison can be performed using Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals.  Read more...

This article will give a basic introduction of Custom Report Item in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.  Read more...

The Trash Destination is now available for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. The Trash Destination and this article came from early experiences of using SSIS and community feedback at the time. When developing a package it is very useful to have a destination adapter that does nothing but consume rows with no setup requirement.  Read more...

You have all read about why object qualification is important. You also must have heard of why stored Proc should not have sp_ as prefix to the name. Now let us proove if this is all true.  Read more...

Although a few different options (Management Studio, system stored procedures, system views, custom scripts, etc.) exist to determine your permissions in SQL Server, in this tip we want to outline the functionality from the fn_my_permissions table valued function.   Read more...

The next European PASS Conference will take place between the 14th - 16th of April 2008 in Neuss, Germany!  Read more...