Additional Articles


External Article

Counting Parents and Children with Count Distinct

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

Technical Article

SQL Server 2005 DB Snapshot: Imperfect Yet Useful?

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

Technical Article

Encrypting Without Secrets

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

Technical Article

The CEO’s Guide to The Top 5 Issues that Misguide Business Intelligenc

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

External Article

SQL Server and MOM 2005

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

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Where Your Value Separates You from Others

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Fixing the Error

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T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Encoding Functions

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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?

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