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...

Adding a column is one of the simpler tasks you'll ever do as a DBA, yet danger lurks! All too often we add columns without going through some type of check list to make sure we're safe. What could adding a column break? You might be surprised!   Read more...

Andy started writing about worst practices a long time ago and returns this week with one that is short and sweet - why defining rows that exceed 8060 characters is a very bad idea and how you can avoid it.   Read more...

We can only guess that someone somewhere put spaces in an object name that Andy works with and gave him the idea for this worst practice. Funny as the topic may sound, we agree - why make your lifer harder?   Read more...

Andy returns to the Worst Practice series this week with a short article looking at how connection strings in applications affect what you see in sysprocesses. Perhaps less controversial (in our opinion) that some of the other worst practices, this is something easy to fix and definitely worth fixing! Read the article and post a comment - explore other points of view! Readers posting a comment will be entered in a drawing for a copy of the SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit.   Read more...

Not even worth talking about, right? Probably, but they still exist. Read about this worst practice and pass it along.   Read more...

This one is pretty interesting, Andy discusses a few things he sees in comments that not only fail to add value, they end up costing extra time. There's room for discussion here, but definitely a discussion worth having - comments can make you or break you, here's a chance to think about what you think is important in commenting and pass that on to your development team.   Read more...

Continuing with our worst practices series, Steve Jones looks at another administrative no-no. Making a change to your live system on the fly.   Read more...

We're curious to see what our readers have to say about this one! How many of us have tables accruing data that won't be used and/or isn't of any value? At what point do we get rid of it to free up resources?   Read more...

If you've been with us for a while you know that Andy started a series last year on worst practices. As he says, maybe you can't always do best practices, but at least dont do the worst ones. Read the article and add a comment, participate!   Read more...

In this article by Neil Weicher, he talks about encryption of data and files for SQL Server.   Read more...

Continuing with the Worst Practices Series: Steve Jones examines why encryption in the database is a bad idea.   Read more...

One of the strengths of SQL Server is its ease of management and administration over other systems. Oracle, DB2, even early versions of SQL Server required command line mastery to make many types of changes. But should you really be using the GUI for most of your tasks?   Read more...

Continuing with Andy Warren's series on Worst Practices for a DBA, Steve Jones joins in this week with his worst practice.   Read more...