Sending Alerts Via a Custom SMTP procedure

SQL Mail comes with SQL, but you have to load Outlook to use it. The alternative is to send email directly via SMTP. Combine that idea with alerts and you've got a new article!

Alert! Alert! Backup and Restore Baby!

Are you using alerts to help you keep track of things? Are you using as many alerts as you should be? Jeremy has a great list of alerts that he considers so important they are on his 'best practice' list. Definitely worth reading.

What is the maximum amount of rows SQL...

Using xp_cmdshell

Haidong continues to point out ideas that might get you thinking about ways you can do more administration with less work. In this article he demonstrates a couple useful tasks you can do with xp_cmdshell.

You are the DBA at a multinational company...

You are a SQL Server DBA for a...

You need to change an existing DEFAULT constraint...

Automatically Gathering Server Information Part 2

The second part of Steve Jones's series on having SQL Server automatically report information to a DBA.

Using WMI

Get started with using WMI (Windows Mgmt Instrumentation) by seeing two good scripts to start with, one to reboot the server, another to list all the services.

Finding Real Dependencies

Sysdepends is a neat idea, but in practice it's not always accurate. This article talks about why it's not always reliable and presents some code (recursive even!) that will let you find all the dependencies by querying the system tables.