People reading this post might really wonder of having read /heard about a concept on Dependency tracking in SQL Server 2008. It is nothing, but a set of built in existing SYS objects and their effective usage that help us save time & tedious efforts.  Read more...

Every day, out in the various discussion boards devoted to Microsoft SQL Server, the same types of questions come up again and again: Why is this query running slow? Is my index getting used? Why isn't my index getting used? In order to arrive at the answer you have to ask the same return question in each case: have you looked at the execution plan? We are very pleased to be allowed to publish the first chapter of Grant Fritchey's excellent new book on execution plans.  Read more...

It's a well known fact that there's no such thing as a true "array" in SQL Server and that you can't pass a table as a parameter... but you can get a lot closer than you think.  Read more...

I would like to share some interesting parameters I found for the undocumented extended stored procedure xp_ReadErrorLog. In doing some testing with this extended stored procedure I found four very interesting parameters. Adding to some of the articles already on the web that discuss undocumented stored procedures, in this article I will explain my testing, use and some examples of the procedure.  Read more...

Database developers need to write stored procedures which are not only fully functional, but also which perform acceptably. This article concentrates on some of the counters used to measure performance and analyses methods of capturing these counters.  Read more...

Two useful functions for dealing with hierarchical data.  Read more...

This article looks at the difference in behavior of RESEED in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005/2008  Read more...

SQL Server expert David Poole discusses how teams can work together and share templates in Management Studio.  Read more...

Growing interest in analytics and the trend toward automated decision making will lead the business intelligence crowd toward the mix of mathematical and statistical techniques used by operations researchers.  Read more...

I have heard that Full Text Search uses a noise words to eliminate meaningless words in searches. I have also heard that a thesaurus is used, but I am not exactly sure how. Can you provide some details related to how both of these technologies are used in Full Text Search? I am interested in more of a background on these specific Full Text Search technologies as well as where the files are located and how I can update them.  Read more...

A look at this book from James Wightman and Apress on the ETL subsystem in SQL Server.  Read more...

In this article I will try to address some of the design suggestions and experiences that I had in managing similar database.  Read more...

How many of you have written resursive queries in SQL? Or any language since school for that matter? Not many people write recusrive queries because of the complexity, the difficulty to understand how they work, and the chance for heap overflows. However, SQL Server 2005 implements Common Table Expressions and recursion in a way that is much easier to code and incorporates some safeguards. New author SQL Server MVP Frederic Brouard has written a fantastic article looking at resursive queries.   Read more...

This article illustrates different methods to insert data into a table, including the new Row Value Constructor, which simplifies the data insertion.  Read more...

A short review of this book by Ben Forta giving you the basics of T-SQL  Read more...

As we are reviewing the new features in SQL Server 2008, we found one that looks really interesting - Policy-Based Management. Could you help us to understand how this works and provide some examples? Can you please explain each of the components and how to manage them in the interface and with commands?  Read more...

Any time you need to modify objects in your SQL Server 2005 database, the objects that are dependent upon those objects are a concern. You don't want to remove columns from tables, procedures, views, or tables if there are objects dependent upon them that are being used.  Read more...

Create DDL table in SQL Server 2005 to audit Data Definition Language (DDL) trigger events when DML statements run. Define DDL trigger to track SQL changes.  Read more...

Continuing on with his amazing series on XML, SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian shows us how to use XML in SQL Server 2005 to generate an ATOM feed.  Read more...