SQL Server high availability. Log shipping or replication, clustering or some other solution. It's a challenge and as companies grow more dependent on their databases, it's one that more and more DBAs face everyday. Paul Ibison has taken a look at how log shipping and replication can be compared in the quest for high availability.   Read more...

One of the few things that SQL Server does not automatically help you with is the design of your tales, views, and other database objects. Having standards and design techniques can greatly ease the maintenance of your schema as well as ease the transition to having others work with the database. New author J.D. Gonzalez brings us some of his naming techniques to keep things organized.   Read more...

Tracking changes to your development environments is important to ensure that your deployments to production go smoothly. Jacob Sebastion brings us a look at how well the Visual Studio Team System Edition for Database Professionals can help you with this task.   Read more...

New Author! Don Peterson writes his first article for us and explores why he considers XML to be...bad! There are some interesting points made here and if you've haven't thought about what XML means to you as a DBA, it's a subject worth spending some time on.   Read more...

Have you ever wanted to ensure that keywords in your data are easily searchable? Have you struggled with full-text search? New author Michael Ahmadi brings us an interesting idea for a keyword tracking and searching subsystem based on T-SQL and triggers.   Read more...

This article, part 4 in a series, discusses how to use, publish, maintain and govern the enterprise architecture.  Read more...

In this next article of the SQL Server in the Enterprise Series, we'll explore how to cluster Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 in a step-by-step manner. After this article, you should be able to cluster a SQL Server 2000 machine for failover availability in an Active/Active cluster.   Read more...

Testing is an important part of any software development process, but it's a part that many of us skimp on or ignore because of the tedious nature of testing. Longtime author Grant Fritchey has been working with Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals and has written us an article on how you can make your unit testing easier.   Read more...

Application locks aren't a well known area of locking in SQL Server, but they can be very useful for special scenarios. They work in an analogous way to the lock() construct in .Net and are basicaly user defined mutexes in SQL Server.  Read more...

How many DBAs need a solution to track those changes made for multiple systems? Auditing is becoming more and more prevalent in all systems and having a good solution can really make your DBA job interesting. New author Keren Ramot brings us his technique that works indepedent of the database structure.   Read more...

Some managers love to look solely at numbers when assessing performance, and key performance indicators (KPIs) are right up their street. But how useful are they in the context of software development  Read more...

Continuing on with a look at SQL Server 205 partitioning features, Andy Warren delves into archiving techniques.   Read more...

SQL Server guru Andy Warren brings us a list of things that he considers when things go wrong. Read about some of the common sense approaches to solving performance and other problems.   Read more...

The Sarbanes-Oxley act has changed many IT jobs, usually requiring more work and documentation. Johan Bijnens brings us a list of some things his team has had to do to comply with SOX regulations.   Read more...

The Sarbanes-Oxley act has drastically changed the jobs of many DBAs with the audit and reporting requirements this act entails. Brandie Tarvin brings us some hints about how you can go about complying with the new requirements.   Read more...

This article discusses: How SQL injection attacks work, Testing for vulnerabilities, Validating user input, Using .NET features to prevent attacks, and Importance of handling exceptions  Read more...

In the latest in their popular series on 'Unit Testing' database development work , Alex K and Alex S give some examples of unit testing Database Modifications  Read more...

Simon Sabin is always cagey about giving advice on the sort of hardware to run SQL Server on, but admits to some general rules.   Read more...

A patch to your SQL Server system can cause problems, but an unpatched SQL Server is unprotected. Learn the pros and cons of SQL Server patches.   Read more...

Alex and Alex continue their series of three articles on 'Unit Testing' database development work with some examples of unit testing stored procedures.   Read more...

SQL Server 2005 builds some great encryption tools into the product, but what if you are stuck with SQL Server 2000? SQL Server expert Michael Coles brings us the first part of a series along with a free toolkit to manage encryption and keys.   Read more...

Auditing is something that almost every DBA needs to tackle at some point in his or her career. David McKinney brings a new twist on the solution by using XML and XSL to help implement auditing in your SQL Server application.   Read more...

This article discusses: How SQL injection attacks work, Testing for vulnerabilities, Validating user input, Using .NET features to prevent attacks, and Importance of handling exceptions  Read more...