Review of SQL 2000 Fast Answers
A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!
2003-04-18
18,238 reads
Andy Warren
Standards Are a Good Thing
This week we have another article from Andy that discusses some changes he made at work in conjunction with clustering all his database servers. Not a how-to, just comments about what was changed and why. Worth reading just for the reminder about the potential gotcha that @@ServerName can represent.
2003-04-09
6,176 reads
Should you buy a SAN?
Andy recently implemented a SAN and shares some of the info he picked up during the purchase and implementation. This article also discusses briefly the differences between SAN and NAS, and has some links to other sites for more info as well.
2003-03-28
8,099 reads
We Studied, We Passed, Was It Worth It?
Several months ago Andy posted a 'Review of Developing Windows Based Applications for VB.Net and C#.Net' and mentioned that his company was requiring all developers to achieve the MCAD within 12 months. Read this to find out how the first exam went, how they studied, what they achieved, and their plans for taking the rest of the exams.
2003-03-21
7,752 reads
Managing Jobs Part 3
This week Andy looks at where, when, and how jobs should be run and why you need to think about those items before you build the job. Part of this is deciding what runs on production servers and what doesn't.
2003-03-11
7,149 reads
Managing Jobs - Part 2
Jobs are pretty basic aren't they? They are until you get a couple hundred, or a thousand. Andy continues talking about managing jobs by standardizing how you handle notifications and failures, and talks about an interesting idea to monitor jobs separately from SQL Agent. Worth reading!
2003-02-14
8,418 reads
Managing Jobs - Part 1
How many jobs do you have? 10? 100? 1000? Andy makes the point that what works to manage for a small number of jobs doesn't work when that number doubles or triples (well, unless you only had 1 job to start with!). In part one of two, this article looks at ideas for using categories and naming conventions to get things under control.
2003-01-31
10,522 reads
Worst Practice - Bad Comments
This one is pretty interesting, Andy discusses a few things he sees in comments that not only fail to add value, they end up costing extra time. There's room for discussion here, but definitely a discussion worth having - comments can make you or break you, here's a chance to think about what you think is important in commenting and pass that on to your development team.
2003-01-23
11,094 reads
Another Disaster (Almost)
Andy had a semi-disaster similar to the one he wrote about last year. Interesting to see the kinds of problems that happen to other people. This article raises some interesting points that are outside the scope of basic disaster recovery, looking at how/when to move databases to a different server and how to reduce the server load dynamically.
2003-01-14
7,062 reads
Default Values and Named Parameters for Stored Procs
Are you using default values for your parameters? Using named parameters when you call the proc or passing the values by ordinal? Should you be? Andy thinks 6 out of 10 of our readers will agree with his point of view, we'll be a little more conservative and guess that 5 of out 10 will be closer.
2003-01-08
8,235 reads
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Where Your Value Separates You from Others
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Fixing the Error
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Question of the Day
Fixing the Error
On SQL Server 2025, I have a database that has this collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. I decide I want to run this code:
SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night', '*') AS 'A Classic';
I get this error:Msg 9844, Level 16, State 4, Line 24 The char/varchar input type uses an unsupported collation. Only a UTF8 collation is supported with char/varchar input type in UNISTR function.What is the easiest way to fix this error? See possible answers