Articles

Technical Article

Strategy, Tactics, and Business Intelligence

There is a lot of talk these days about “business intelligence” (BI for short). Pick up any magazine aimed at business or technology professionals, and you’re sure to read about things like data warehouses, dashboards, cubes, ETL, SCD, and a seemingly endless list of other specialized terms and acronyms. One might be left wondering, is this something to which I should be paying attention?

2006-06-06

2,524 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

XML - Good and Bad

XML is becoming more and more the mainstream for data transfers between systems. Web services and SOAP communications are built into SQL Server 2005, requiring the more and more DBAs understand how to work with XML. Raj Vasant has written a number of articles on XML and brings us a look at how XML should and should not be used.

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2006-06-05

9,792 reads

Technical Article

Jacksonville Free HA Event From Microsoft and SQLServerCentral.com

If you're in Jacksonville next week, whether you’re a developer, DBA or manager, you’ll get something out of this all day SQL Server free event. This event is being run with Microsoft and Idea Integration (Brian from SQLServerCentral.com) and will be at a detailed tech level (no marketing). This all-day session is designed to Get You Started with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 High Availability and gotchas when upgrading to 2005. High availability is a hot topic for most enterprise customers. Any application downtime can impact your business, resulting in revenue loss, customer dissatisfaction, and damaging creditability of their business. These 300 Level sessions will be mostly demos! When you leave this, you should know how to mirror a database and cluster. RSVP required.

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2006-06-02

789 reads

External Article

SQL Server Performance Testing

This (new) design bothered me. It violated one of the fundamentals that I'd learned and read about for years; namely keeping the primary key small and narrow. It also looked like it would be difficult to maintain. Finally, after arguing back and forth about the merits and drawbacks of each of the designs, we decided that testing them was the only way to be sure

2006-06-02

4,359 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Data Driven Subscriptions

Reporting Services is a great subsystem for SQL Server that fulfills quite a few needs. However just like SQL Server, there are some features that are limited to the Enterprise Editions, something that not every user can afford to implement. New author Jason Selburg brings us a way to implement subscriptions to reports using Standard edition.

5 (6)

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2006-06-01

25,570 reads

External Article

SQL Server 2005 Integration Services - Transaction Support - Part 25

The latest article in our series discusses improvements in the transactional support implemented in SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. The more granular scope of transactions, which now can be assigned to arbitrarily designated Control Flow tasks and containers, makes it is possible to limit their impact or execute several of them in parallel. However, even with this improved functionality, you need to keep the blocking issues they might potentially introduce in mind.

2006-06-01

2,138 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Foreign Keys

Foreign keys are an important part of a relational database. New author Ravi Lobo takes a look at foreign keys from the perspective of a new DBA with some scripts to help you ensure your database is setup correctly.

4.6 (5)

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2006-05-31

19,856 reads

External Article

Talking Technical

Should IT managers understand technical issues, or is a full appreciation of the technology somehow unworthy and unnecessary for senior staff? In such a rapidly changing industry where fortunes are made and lost by attempting to exploit gaps in the market too thin to see with the naked eye, the answer would seem obvious. However, I have repeatedly come across amazing gaps in the technical knowledge of managers.

2006-05-31

2,425 reads

Technical Article

Load 1TB in less than 1 hour

This project was done using SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (with SP1 beta) using the BULK INSERT command with 60 parallel input files, each of approximately 16.67 GB. The best time I got was 50 minutes. Hewlett Packard was kind enough to loan me some time one night on the machine they use to do the TPC-H tests. It is an Itanium2 Superdome with 64 1.6GHZ 9M (Madison) CPUs. For the insert tests the system was equipped with 256GB of RAM. The HP SAN configuration is rated at 14GB per second throughput.

2006-05-30

2,290 reads

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Single User SQL Server on Linux

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