DATA PIRACY: THE THREAT FROM WITHIN

Databases are being stolen. Customer data, credit card data, taxpayer data - they're all vulnerable. Scary? Yes - but wait, there's more. It's not just "their" data that's vulnerable - it's ours too!

Setting Matters Straight

Fabian Pascal, famed database author and writer takes his shots at a recent thread on another SQL site. He makes some good points about normalization.

SQL Server 2005 Recursive Functions

SQL Server 2005 has added a new format for queries called a Common Table Expression or CTE. CTE’s are part of the SQL:1999 Specification and represent further compliance with this specification by SQL Server. This article will cover using one of the many capabilities of CTE’s, implementing recursive functions. A recursive function is a one that iteratively executes itself. Understanding how CTE’s implement recursive functions is the first step to understanding the full capabilities of CTE’s.

SQL Server Database Index Performance

When it comes to auditing index use in SQL Server databases, I sometimes get overwhelmed. For example, how to do you go about auditing indexes in a database with over 1,500 tables? While auditing a single index is relatively straight-forward, auditing thousands of them in multiple databases is not an easy task. Whether the task is easy or not, it is an important task if you want to optimize the performance of your SQL Server databases.

Linked Servers: Creating, Setting Options, and Querying

Have you ever had to access data from either a non-SQL Server source or from a separate SQL Server database (either residing on the same instance or on a separate instance)? Rahul Sharmas discusses how to bridge the gap between two different SQL Server instances or between heterogenous RDBMS such as SQL Server and Oracle: Use linked servers!

SQL Server 2005 - Managed execution

The next version of SQL Server named SQL Server 2005 is completely hyped with the integration of CLR into SQL Server. The introduction of CLR into SQL Server allows developers to write stored procedures, triggers, user defined functions, user defined aggregates and user defined types using .NET languages like VB.NET and C#. This introduction has opened up multiple avenues for developers and we need to be careful in maximizing the feature provided.

SQL Server 2005: Integrating SQL, XML, and XQuery

The evolution of SQL and the XML Query Language (XQuery) continues with the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS). Providers of SQL database management systems have upgraded products such as Microsoft SQL Server to support the storage and retrieval of XML documents. Microsoft has provided stored procedures and Transact-SQL extensions for working with XML. On the horizon are even more changes as Microsoft introduces SQL Server 2005. (MP3 Audio)

Understanding "Yukon" Schema Separation

Well it has finally arrived, at least in the Beta version. Microsoft's long awaited latest version of it's SQL Server product has arrived in Beta version and holds promise to be a major and successful revision of this fine product. I have had the Beta version for a few months now and one of the new security items that has intrigued me the most is the separation of users and schemas. I've worked with this form of separation before in Microsoft's chief competitor, but this article is not a comparison of the two products or the way they implement schema separation; it is an article on the basics of user/schema separation for those SQL Server DBAs who may have not worked with separated schema separation before.

Trace-scrubbing Tools

Andrew Zanevsky shares his trace-scrubbing procedures that make it easy for you to handle large trace files and aggregate transactions by type–even when captured T-SQL code has variations.

SQL Server Profiler is a veritable treasure trove when it comes to helping DBAs optimize their T-SQL code. But, the surfeit of riches (I'm reminded of the Arabian Nights tale of Aladdin) can be overwhelming. I recently had one of those "sinking" feelings when I first tried to make sense of the enormous amount of data collected by traces on a client's servers. At this particular client, the online transactions processing system executes more than 4 million database transactions per hour. That means that even a 30-minute trace that captures "SQL Batch Completed" events results in a table with 2 million rows. Of course, it's simply impractical to process so many records without some automation, and even selecting the longest or most expensive transactions doesn't necessarily help in identifying bottlenecks. After all, short transactions can be the culprits of poor performance when executed thousands of times per minute.

Internal SQL Server Diagnostics Tools, Part 1: PSSDiag

Ken Henderson explains how to use PSSDiag, a diagnostics collection tool for SQL Server. PSSDiag is one of several Microsoft Product Support Services tools recently released to the Web that are now available for personal use. (26 printed pages)