Trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack of your SQL Server transactions is no small task. SQL Server Profiler not only helps you find that needle, it gives you details on all the other needles in a single interface.
2006-01-26
2,525 reads
The aggregate functions in SQL Server (min, max, sum, count, average, etc.) are great tools for reporting and business analysis. But sometimes, you need to tweak them just a little bit to get exactly the results you need. For example, if your manager came to you and asked for a report on how many sales have been made to your clients and how large they were, would you know how to get the data you need efficiently? Mark ran into something like this recently and here's the approach he took to solve the problem.
2006-01-25
3,507 reads
Database Snapshot (DB Snapshot for short) is a new tool offered by SQL Server 2005. Database snapshots can be used to protect against user errors, by creating a "snapshot" of your data that you can refer to later if you need to recover data or database objects that were accidentally (or even intentionally) updated or dropped. While the feature is quite useful, it doesn’t provide a 100% guarantee against user errors.
2006-01-24
2,078 reads
Do you have a Web site or other system that deals in secrets of any sort? It seems like every time I give a security talk, people ask how to deal with the sticky problem of storing secrets. Connection strings with passwords are an obvious problem. You're better off simply using integrated security to get rid of those secrets, at least with SQL Server™, or an Oracle database. But what about credit card numbers and other financial or personal information? Can encryption help?
2006-01-23
2,476 reads
When considering business intelligence (BI) software, it is essential to be aware of underlying issues that can seriously impact on your bottom line. In a country where most businesses have information stored in several different databases, it’s no secret that the BI strategy you choose will effect your profit and loss target. From data collection and integration to data analysis, the holy grail of Business Intelligence software combines your disparate databases to provide a decision support system that will enable you to make key conclusions using all of the available information.
2006-01-20
2,455 reads
This document describes the improved indexed views capability of SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. Indexed views are explained and specific scenarios in which they may provide performance improvements are discussed.
2006-01-19
2,506 reads
As we all know, SQL Server 2005 has new features when compared to SQL Server 2000. One of the features that we are going to discuss in this article is the Row_Number() function. SQL Server Database administrators and developers have been longing for this function for a long time--now the wait is over.
2006-01-18
4,705 reads
SP_WHO_3 is a very powerful utility for all DBAs. It displays processes connected to the system and what they are doing. It can find blocking processes, can return the Input Buffer for everything in the recordset returned, and provides immense filtering and sorting capabilities. It's designed to be extremely efficient, yet it provides many more […]
2006-01-17 (first published: 2004-08-12)
2,438 reads
In this series of articles, you will learn the basics of installing Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 as well as how to use MOM to monitor SQL Server. This article takes advantage of virtualization. We will use VMware Workstation 5 to create the lab to introduce you to the basics of installing MOM to monitor SQL Server.
2006-01-17
3,401 reads
A question came up on an internal alias about how can one download a file over HTTP. Here's a script that does that, should be trivial to wrap it inside a task if you forsee doing this over and over again.
2006-01-13
2,470 reads
By Brian Kelley
There's a great article from MIT Technology Review about resetting on the hype of...
By Steve Jones
etherness – n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones,...
By Steve Jones
A customer was asking about tracking logins and logouts in Redgate Monitor. We don’t...
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Microsoft SQL Year in...
If I create a multiple column Primary Key constraint, what is the most number of bytes I can include in the constraint?
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