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Secrets of successful IT projects

Some time ago, I worked on a team that was attempting to define an IT strategy for a large multinational company. Management incorrectly thought the company was unique in that it had a high number of failed IT projects. In fact, only one in four IT projects can be termed successful, if the benchmarks of success are adherence to scheduled completion time and budget, and realization of the project goal, whether that be saving money, growing the business, or what have you. I have to explain this because many of you may never have come across one.

2005-12-05

3,803 reads

External Article

Using SQL Server 2005 sqlcmd Utility

SQL Server 2005 provides some new command line utilities. One such utility is "sqlcmd". The sqlcmd utility is used to run adhoc queries interactively from a command prompt window, or can be used to execute a script containing T-SQL statements. The sqlcmd utility is a great improvement over osql and isql of older releases of SQL Server. In this article, I will explain some of the features this new command line utility brings to administering SQL Server.

2005-12-02

1,391 reads

External Article

Using TRY/CATCH to Resolve a Deadlock in SQL Server 2005

A deadlock is an inevitable situation in the RDBMS architecture and very common in high-volume OLTP environments. A deadlock situation is when at least two transactions are waiting for each other to complete. The Common Language Runtime (CLR) of .NET lets SQL Server 2005 provide developers with the latest way to deal with error handling. In case of a deadlock, the TRY/CATCH method is powerful enough to handle the exceptions encountered in your code irrespective of how deeply nested the application is in a stored procedure.

2005-11-25

3,655 reads

External Article

Views in SQL Server

A view is a virtual table that consists of columns from one or more tables. Though it is similar to a table, it is stored in the database. It is a query stored as an object. Hence, a view is an object that derives its data from one or more tables. These tables are referred to as base or underlying tables.

2005-11-24

4,248 reads

Technical Article

Checksum Transformation

The Checksum Transformation computes a hash value, the checksum, across one or more columns, returning the result in the Checksum output column. The transformation provides functionality similar to the T-SQL CHECKSUM function, but is encapsulated within SQL Server Integration Services, for use within the pipeline without code or a SQL Server connection.

2005-11-23

1,697 reads

Technical Article

Building Reports Based On Stored Procedures

Usually developers like having full control over their reports but what happens if you have someone designated to build reports who does not quite know the backend schema. A good way to separate the building of the data for the report and the report design could be stored procedures. Now I consume stored procedures using Oracle which is not much different consuming stored procedures with SQL Server, however building the procedures is much different between the two. Even though I mention and show examples of stored procedures this is not an article for building them, just a guide for consuming a stored procedure within a Reporting Services Report.

2005-11-22

3,591 reads

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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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