Additional Articles


External Article

Building Code that Promotes Plan Re-usage

This article, the third in the T-SQL Best Practices series, discusses how to write your code to promote cached plan re-usage. Understanding how white space and comments impact whether a plan is cached or an existing plan is re-used can help you minimize the number of plans your application is caching.

2009-08-31

3,815 reads

External Article

How to find, compare and use the exact same session settings as another user in SQL Server

When diagnosing issues in SQL Server I've found that sometimes I need to be able to mimic a user's session state when attempting to repeat an error they may be receiving. The smallest differences can completely change the outcome, so I need to ensure all the session settings (QUOTED_IDENTIFIER, ANSI_NULLS, and so forth) are identical between the production session and my test session. Is there an easy way to determine these settings with a single query?

2009-08-31

2,627 reads

Technical Article

Kimball University: Five Alternatives for Better Employee Dimension Modeling

The employee dimension presents one of the trickier challenges in data warehouse modeling. These five approaches ease the complication of designing and maintaining a 'Reports To' hierarchy for ever-changing reporting relationships and organizational structures.

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2009-08-26

3,651 reads

Technical Article

The Ghost in the Machine

Now that hierarchical data structures are popular again because of XML, their full hierarchical processing is still being limited to flat two dimensional linear path processing by relational processing. This will change when database professionals realize that ANSI SQL relational processing can now support full multipath nonlinear hierarchical processing.

2009-08-25

3,326 reads

External Article

Validate SQL Server Backups Exist with Policy Based Management

I recently submitted a tip regarding the existence of your backup files using the undocumented system stored procedure xp_fileexist. But how would you go about executing that script against all your SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 instances? I took that script and decided to go one step further using Policy Based Management to create a custom policy that you can then run against all your SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 instances.

2009-08-25

2,712 reads

Blogs

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Forums

Multiple Deployment Processes

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases

By Kunal Rathi

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Upgrading Admin Queries

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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