To kick off a series of DBA worst case scenarios, we asked Phil Factor to confess. He came up with a classic: The mistaken belief that a backup WITH CHECKSUM guaranteed a good backup that could be restored, and the ensuing disaster.
2012-02-02
5,280 reads
In a recent MSSQLTips.com question, a user asked how they could get an alert whenever a login failed due to the account being locked out. As with many problems, there are several ways to solve this issue.
2012-02-01
1,962 reads
Row Sampling Transformation and Percentage Sampling Transformation provide data sampling functionality. This functionality is useful in a number of Analysis Services and Data Mining-based scenarios.
2012-01-31
1,836 reads
The most common T-SQL command in use has to be the SELECT statement, it is the bedrock of any SQL Professional's day. Sometimes it's used to snatch some data from a table or two while some quick investigation is done, other times it is at the heart of a stored procedure or view that will inform business decisions for coming months or even years.
2012-01-30
4,672 reads
In this tip, we will see how to build a report which shows the cumulative sales amount for the current month, current quarter (QTD) and current year (YTD) in a single crosstab (tablix) report, which makes it easy to compare the data.
2012-01-27
2,781 reads
Every so often, the question comes up on forums of how to pass a list as a parameter to a SQL procedure or function. Phil Factor provides some examples using XML, and tests them against other popular methods.
2012-01-26
4,027 reads
I recently encountered a situation where the drive hosting Sharepoint Databases in a Staging environment ran out of space. I logged onto the server and found that the msdb database has itself occupied 38 GB of the total disk space. Msdb database generally contain maintenance information for the database such as backups, log shipping and so on.
2012-01-25
2,711 reads
There are lots of things to think about when you design a physical database. What data types should I use? What column is appropriate for the primary key? Are there particular indexes that I should use to improve performance? How should I implement data integrity rules? This list goes on and on. In this article Greg Larsen will be exploring different physical database design elements.
2012-01-24
3,644 reads
In this next article in our series where well-known SQL Server people write about their favorite SQL Server Howlers, we asked Tom Larock for his top five common misunderstandings about how SQL Server works that end in tears, and plaintive forum questions.
2012-01-23
3,823 reads
XML data can become a full participant in a SQL Server Database, and can be used in views, functions, check constraints, computed columns and defaults. Views and table-valued functions can be used to provide a tabular view of XML data that can be used in SQL Expressions. Robert Sheldon explains how.
2012-01-20
2,557 reads
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item 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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