Database Geek of the Week - Itzik Ben-Gan

Itzik Ben-Gan is a writer and mentor in the development community. He writes a monthly column for SQL Server Magazine and co-authored Advanced Transact-SQL for SQL Server 2000 . He is one of the founders of Solid Quality Learning, a global provider of education and solutions for the Microsoft database platform, and serves as its principal mentor.

Auto Logout Users for DB Maintenance

One thing Access developers love about using SQL Server as the back end is that it is easy to do maintenance. I can't tell you how many times I toured around an office, looking for users who had their client open and connected to the data so I could ask them to log out. Too many times, the offender was at lunch or away from their desks, with their desktops locked.

Hacker's-eye view of SQL Server

If a hacker sets sights on your SQL Server, there are four primary methods he can use to take control and carry out unauthorized, malicious activity. I will look at each of these: Password compromise, Account compromise, SQL injection, Buffer overflows

MSSQL Server Reporting Services: Mastering OLAP Reporting: Relationall

Throughout this and other of my series, we have examined parameterization and parameter picklist support. While my focus has often been support of picklists using datasets generated through MDX queries against the cube under consideration, I have often found myself in client engagement scenarios where differing reporting requirements, as well as various "exceptions," drive a need to extend picklist support beyond the capabilities of the basic MDX queries that we have examined.

Dimensional Modeling 101 - Time vs Date

When most DW designers begin developing a data warehouse, the Time dimension is the first dimension reviewed with the users. There are usually two or three different persectives on what the Time dimension should represent but, for the most part, it will be used for such calculations as Year-to-date Sales, Monthly Inventory Churn, etc. What most users are actually describing is a Date, or Calendar dimension.

Debugging in Visual Studio.NET 2005

Debugging is an important process for any level of programming to ensure programs function as expected. Most productive developer environments provide tools and utilities to assist with the debugging process. Visual Studio.NET 2005 is equipped with a number of debugger visualizers, but users can also create their own based on an individual project.

Stored procedure: Search character columns for a given string

This tip continues the system stored procedure series with a routine to find occurrences of a string in the character columns of selected tables.

Minimizing the need to restore a backup

The second installment of this series discussed the cost of maintaining systems with various levels of downtime, ways data can be lost, and what constitutes a backup. In this installment, I discuss how to configure your hardware to minimize the need to restore a backup.

Two True Calendar

two True Calendar

File Watcher Task

The File Watcher Task does what it says really, it watches a folder waiting for files. When an available file is found the task completes, returning the name of the file for later use.

The task will detect changes to existing files as well as new files, both actions will cause the file to be found when available. A file is available when the task can open it exclusively. This is important for files that take a long time to be written, such as large files, or those that are just written slowly or delivered via a slow network link.