Even a cursory inspection of data management practice reveals that the majority of practitioners-–be they novices, or experienced, users or vendors--operate in a “cookbook”, product-specific mode, without really knowing and understanding the fundamental concepts and principles underlying their field, e.g. what data means, what data model, database, DBMS, data independence really are, and so on.
2005-06-17
2,510 reads
This article presents a broad set of guidelines to define the value, voice and visibility for a unified BI project.
2005-06-16
2,324 reads
This is the third article of our series discussing SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS), which provides Extraction, Transformation, and Loading features, replacing Data Transformation Services (DTS) available in SQL Server 2000 and 7.0. We have already presented an overview of the basic concepts necessary to design and implement SSIS-based projects. We have also stepped through the creation of one such project using Business Intelligence Development Studio. Our sample SSIS package, described in our previous article, delivered the basic functionality we needed (running an external process and loading the outcome of its execution stored temporarily in a text file into a database), however, it had one major shortcoming - a lack of support for reusability.
2005-06-15
1,968 reads
In the first article of this series, we presented the basic concepts relevant to understanding SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, which is the primary mechanism for Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) functionality available in SQL Server 2005. We also provided a quick overview of tools that allow you to manage such activities as DTS package design, development, and storage, as well as interactive and scheduled execution. In order to gain better familiarity with each of these activities, we will look at them from a more practical perspective, using a number of fairly straightforward examples.
2005-06-14
2,231 reads
One of the SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 features that has undergone considerable architectural, functional, and interface changes, compared with its earlier versions, deals with extraction, transformation, and loading (also known as simply ETL) of data. (In other words, allowing you to move data between a variety of stores and to modify it in the process, according to your arbitrary requirements). While in SQL Server 7.0 and 2000, such capabilities have been provided by Data Transformation Services (DTS in short), Microsoft decided that the degree of modifications introduced in the new version justified re-branding it, hence its rearchitectured and significantly improved implementation has been introduced under the new name of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
2005-06-13
12,405 reads
This is the first article in a series on writing stored procedures using the Common Language Runtime (CLR). This article focuses on basic C# syntax and using Visual Studio to build a stored procedure. It's targeted at DBA's and anyone else who primarily writes in Transact-SQL and hasn't had much exposure to .NET yet.
2005-06-10
5,111 reads
Occasionally, SQL Server database administrators are requested to provide a list of development SQL Servers, production SQL Servers and so on. Many articles, such as "Monitor Disk Space on Multiple SQL Servers" and "Inventorying hardware and OS information on all SQL Servers" require a list of servers in a text file.
2005-06-08
2,281 reads
When a SQL Server object is created, its properties are called metadata. The metadata is stored in special System Tables. For example, in SQL 2000, when a new column was created, the column name and data type could be found in an internal System Table called syscolumns. All SQL objects produce metadata. Every time SQL 2000 Enterprise Manager or SQL 2005 SQL Server Management Studio is browsed, the information displayed about database, tables, and all objects, comes from this metadata.
2005-06-07
3,314 reads
This paper will explain and show how standard ANSI SQL processors can naturally model and automatically process complex multi-leg hierarchical data structures at a full conceptual hierarchical level. This also means the query user does not need to have structure knowledge of the hierarchical structures involved. The data modeling capability includes dynamically combining logical hierarchical relational and physical XML data structures at a full hierarchical level. This also includes the ability to link below the root of the lower level structure intuitively forming a valid unified hierarchical structure. As will be shown, ANSI SQL’s high level hierarchical data processing allows the flexible conceptual control of hierarchical node promotion, fragment processing, structure transformation, and variable structure creation.
2005-06-03
2,567 reads
My interest in writing this article was started by an MSDN article titled SQL Server 2005: The CLR Enters the Relational Stage. The article shows how to write a function that returns the top three countries per category. That's always been something that was difficult to do in SQL so I was curious about the approach. The article started out well but I was very unhappy by the end. It's just soooo much easier to do this in SQL Server 2005 using the new CROSS APPLY clause in Transact-SQL. So I'm going to write a query to return the top 3 orders for each customer and I'm going to do it in about 10 lines of SQL. (UPDATE: An alert reader found an even better approach!)
2005-06-02
3,066 reads
By Steve Jones
At Redgate, we’re experimenting with how AI can help developers and DBAs become better...
I was messing around performing investigative work on a pod running SQL Server 2025...
By Steve Jones
Redgate recently released SQL Compare v16, which included a new feature to work with...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item What is Page Density
Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL in SQL Server 2025:...
Looking to confirm my understanding of these three products and how they can be...
In SQL Server, there is a concept of page density. This is determined by how much data is stored on each page. What is a page density of 90%?
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