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!
2004-01-13
14,456 reads
Administration
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.
2004-01-08
11,554 reads
2004-01-05
1,735 reads
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.
2004-01-05
21,808 reads
2004-01-02
2,184 reads
2003-12-31
1,733 reads
2003-12-29
1,701 reads
Automatically Gathering Server Information Part 2
The second part of Steve Jones's series on having SQL Server automatically report information to a DBA.
2003-12-25
13,346 reads
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.
2003-12-23
10,040 reads
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.
2003-12-18
9,490 reads
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers