http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Articles posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)Application roles often interesting possibilities in theory. In practice? Brian explores how they work and some of the pros/cons you should consider before selecting them for use in your applications. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/sqlserversecurityprosandconsofapplicationroles/1116/2008/07/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Security/sqlserversecurityprosandconsofapplicationroles/1116/This article presents an excerpt from the book, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step, by Stacia Misner and Hitachi Consulting. Learn how to monitor reporting services by implementing an execution logging database and reviewing reports that query that database.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63195/2008/07/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63195/SQL Server 2008 introduces the Database Backup Compression feature. This article describes how to take advantage of this new featurehttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63702/2008/07/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63702/Part 4 in this series on upgrading an Active/Active cluster to SQL Server 2005 details how to push live data from one cluster to another using a conversion DB and replication.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63699/2008/07/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63699/Here the author introduces SQL Server Data Services, which exposes its functionality over standard Web service interfaces. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63707/2008/07/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63707/The functionality of additional columns / rows in a cross table ("matrix") in Reporting Services is limited to totals / subtotals. By using a stored function a solution is described.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Reporting+Services/63415/2008/07/24http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Reporting+Services/63415/Longtime expert DBA Thomas Laorck brings us a short article about how he uses Operations Manager to watch the SQL Servers he is responsible for and ignore others.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Operations+Manager/63490/2008/07/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Operations+Manager/63490/A new series sponsored by Actuality Business Intelligence on data warehousing. In part 1, the data flow in SSIS packages are used to profile the source data and determine how it should be handled in the process.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/ETL/63792/2008/07/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/ETL/63792/Registration for SQLBits III, to be held at Hatfield in the UK on September 13th, is now open! SQLBits is the UK's finest SQL Server technical conference, and it's 100% free to attend!http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63793/2008/07/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63793/Over the years, I have witnessed many developers being confused about when to use data-manipulation language (DML) triggers vs. when to use constraints.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63705/2008/07/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63705/With ranking functions in SQL Server 2005, you can rank rows in result sets. This tip defines rank functions and gives examples of how to use the four available functions.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63700/2008/07/22http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63700/Learn how to monitor database-level actions and write audit results to files.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63698/2008/07/22http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63698/Expert SQL Server trainer Andy Warren brings us a new article on a lesser used feature in SQL server 2005: the ability to disable an index.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Indexing/63533/2008/07/22http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Indexing/63533/To create your own spelling suggestion feature, you need a look-up with correct spellings and misspellings. I walk you through it.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/63404/2008/07/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/63404/It is irritating, sometimes alarming, for the user to be confronted by the 'deadlock message' when a deadlock happens. It can be a tiresome business to prevent them from occurring in applications. Fortunately, the profiler can be used to help DBAs identify how deadlocking problems happen, and indicate the best way of minimising the likelihood of their reappearance.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63693/2008/07/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63693/While working on a project recently I was asked to develop a mechanism that would provide the dates for state and federal holidays in a given year. Since this project deals with all states and territories of the United States, the list had to be comprehensive and the client asked that this list be in the form of a SQL query calculated on-the-fly, rather than a static list.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63696/2008/07/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63696/This is a follow up to the article "Return Query Text Along With sp_who2 Using Dynamic Management Views".http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL+Server+2000/63542/2008/07/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL+Server+2000/63542/Building high performance applications with SQL Server can be a challenge if you do not understand how the query processor works and how the server uses indexes. SQL Server expert Randy Dyess brings a look at how bookmark lookups are used when satisfying a query and how this can impact the performance of your query. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning+and+Scaling/bookmarklookups/1899/2008/07/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Performance+Tuning+and+Scaling/bookmarklookups/1899/Some time ago, I loaded a large set of data into one my tables. To speed up the load, I disabled the FOREIGN KEY and CHECK constraints on the table and then re-enabled them after the load was complete. I am now finding that some of the loaded data was referentially invalid. What happened?http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63695/2008/07/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63695/This document assists Crystal Report designers with migrating to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services using a step-by-step migration strategy.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63194/2008/07/18http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63194/Longtime SQL Server author Dinesh Asanka brings us a new article on backing up an Analysis Services database.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Analysis+Services/63382/2008/07/17http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Analysis+Services/63382/Build List Updated with Cumulative Update 8 for SP2. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administration/2960/2008/07/17http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administration/2960/This article is a brief overview of Service Broker's core features, which are available (in a somewhat limited capacity) in SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. The next installment will describe a sample application illustrating its operations and discuss its management, security, and routing characteristics.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63697/2008/07/17http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63697/New author Roi Assa brings us a short look at temp tables and table variables and describes a few of the characteristics and behaviors you might not have been aware of.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/63472/2008/07/17http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/63472/This long running, and very popular, XML series continues with a look at building an ATOM feed with SQL Server.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/XML/63535/2008/07/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/XML/63535/Histograms help people analyze large amounts of data, whether you display them as tables or as charts. This article shows you how to do both. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63651/2008/07/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63651/One thing you may need to do is dynamically return a set amount of rows based on user input. This could be for a search function, reports, dropdown lists or whatever. Instead of hard coding a set value you would like to pass in a variable that will then determine the number of rows to return. How can this be done with T-SQL?http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63694/2008/07/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63694/We have a new author at SQLServerCentral.com, Muthusamy Anantha Kumar AKA The MAK, who starts a new series on the basics that a DBA needs to know. This installment walks over basic backup and restore.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administration/63641/2008/07/15http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administration/63641/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!http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63692/2008/07/15http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63692/Table locking hints provide developers much tighter control of their transactions. Look at the benefits and disadvantages of using the NOLOCK and READPAST table hints in SQL Serverhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63532/2008/07/15http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/63532/