Living the "Least Privilege" Lifestyle: Don't Run Every Day Logged In

Don Kiely contends that exercising administrative rights over our computers is a major cause of insecure systems. In the first of five articles, he explains the concept of "least privilege" and shows why software developers should be happy to operate as "mere users."

Employee Retention From the Managers Perspective

Part 3 of Steve Jones' series on employee retention, this one focused on the manager's point of view in keeping employees around. Gain some insight into how the manager may view your situation and understand why he or she may act as they do.

So you want to be a DBA...

Written by an Oracle guy, but it's still some good advice for people that want to be DBAs. If you're experienced, pass it along to others that are looking to move into this role.

SSIS - Code Reuse and Complex Control Flows

SQL Server 2005 Integration Services is an incredibly powerful, but complex environment for creating ETL packages. Kristian Wedberg brings us a new article on reusing some of your code and some complex looping structures that you might want to use in your applications.

SQL database control and deployment

If you develop SQL databases, you know how difficult it can be to promote from the development environment to production with any level of confidence that the databases are the same.

When you have upgrades, it’s difficult to identify changes as well, especially when there are multiple developers making changes to multiple databases. The problem is compounded if your target environment is a client’s system over which you have no control. It’s staggering to think about what can happen if there are 600-plus client systems that have various versions of your database.

Reporting Services 2005

Reporting Services has been enhanced in SQL Server 2005 and new author Anubhav Bansal brings us a how-to guide for editing your reports.

Finding Duplicate Indexes in Large SQL Server Databases

One important component of tuning a large, heavily used database, is to ensure that the tables are indexed optimally: enough indexing, but not too much indexing for the application you are running. There are rules of thumb about index tuning, but the entire issue is so complex that there's no "silver bullet" solution that will work for every case. However, in tuning indexes we can generally say that it's not a good idea to maintain duplicate indexes on the same data. SQL Server does not provide checks to prevent duplicate indexes from being created, as long as the names are different

Calling All Editing Buffs

Author Sean McCown would like to see some improvements in the editing tools that are available. He's proposed some changes and ideas to make a better tool. Join the discussion and see if you can get the SQL Server vendors to build something to make every DBA's job easier.

Creating a PDF from a Stored Procedure in SQL Server

A short but interesting article, the author has figured out a way to create a PDF from a stored procedure without using a third party library.

On The Road Again...Part I

An interesting interview with Raj Gill, SQL Server 2005 Roadshow Presenter by Robert Pearl. Get inside the mind of the co-founder of Scalability Experts.