SQL Building Blocks and Server Settings

This chapter covers the building blocks available to the database designer and database user to create and modify database objects and data. The SQL Data Types will be covered along with data representation as literals (constants) and expressions.

SQL Server 2005 Security - Part 3 Encryption

After discussing authentication and authorization behavior of SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 in the previous two articles of this series, it is time to look into other security-related changes. In particular, we will focus on the freshly introduced native database encryption capabilities. While some encryption functionality existed in the previous versions (e.g. involving column encryption APIs within User Defined Functions or PWDENCRYPT password one-way hash function), it was relatively limited and rarely used. SQL Server 2005 provides significant improvements in this area.

COM Without Registration

When .NET first appeared it wasn't unusual to hear the question "Is COM dead?" In fact COM seems to be alive and well, and in this article I'll look at the way that Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 allow you to use COM in a side-by-side way without installing the usual registration entries – you won't need to use the Windows Registry to use side-by-side COM components.

SQL Server 2005 Security - Part 2 Authorization

Following the discussion of new or enhanced authentication-related functionality in SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 in our previous article, we are shifting our focus to authorization features, which determine the level of access rights once the user's logon process is successfully completed. Among topics that will be covered here, are separation of user and schema, modifiable context of module execution, increased permission granularity, and improved catalog security.

Changing XML Schema attached in SQL Server 2005

XML has become an first class datatype in SQL Server 2005 . You can check my previous articles for an idea of XML features introduced. In this article we will take a look at how we can alter a XML Schema attached to an Typed XML data. XML's can be caegorized into two categories, typed and un-typed. Any XML that conforms to an XML schema is called as typed. And on the contrary plain XML strings are called as un-typed.

Replicating Identity columns in SQL Server - Customizing replication

When transactional replication is used for high availability purposes, such as if you want the applications to access the replicated server when the primary database server fails, one of the hurdles SQL Server database administrators face when configuring replication is tables with identity columns.

In this article, I am going to discuss how to customize the replication in order to make the subscription database look identical to the publishing database, so that when there is a failure in the primary server, it is simple to fail over to the subscription database.

Data Mining Reloaded

The two main functions of data mining are classification and prediction (or forecasting). Data mining helps you make sense of those countless gigabytes of raw data stored in databases by finding important patterns and rules present in the data or derived from it. Analysts then use this knowledge to make predictions and recommendations about new or future data. The main business applications of data mining are learning who your customers are and what they need, understanding where the sales are coming from and what factors affect them, fashioning marketing strategies, and predicting future business indicators.

The Insight Reports: Grid Computing

In the two years since Insight's last examination of the topic, grid computing has moved out of the laboratory and into mainstream commercial applications. No longer the exclusive tool of researchers seeking to harness enough compute power for massive computational challenges such as weather modeling or weapons test simulations, today grids are being deployed in more traditional commercial computing applications. For example, commercial computing stalwarts IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Sun recently announced they were forming the Globus Consortium to drive the technology into the mainstream for applications such as financial analysis, oil exploration and pharmaceutical testing. And within the technical community, new standards being developed called the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) will foster convergence of the Web service and grid computing communities, which in the years ahead is likely to have a major impact on quality and diversity of Web services.

SQL Server Data Structure

A look at the page, table, and index structures inside SQL Server.

MSSQL Server 2000 Reporting Services : Black Belt Administration: Exec

We introduced our previous article, Prepare the Execution Log for Reporting, with a discussion about a valuable source of information for performance and auditing analysis, identifying the Report Server Execution Log as a great place to start for this sort of reporting. We noted that the Execution Log captures data specific to individual reports, including when a given report was run, identification of the user who ran it, delivery destination of the report, and which rendering format was used, among other information.