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.

Microsoft product support has asked you to put...

You are a database developer for your company's...

Server side tracing in SQL Server, using system stored procedures

Ever wanted to use the SQL Trace system stored procedures instead of Profiler, but got intimidated by the cryptic system stored procedure calls? Then this article is just for you. It will show you how to use SQL Trace system stored procedures and provide you with wrapper stored procedures, that can be used to quickly get server side traces up and running.

Which SQL Server 2000 upgrade path is invalid?

How many extents can fit into a megabyte...

New JDBC Driver for SQL

This is one of the vendors we met at PASS 2003. Their new driver is supposed to be faster than the driver provided by Microsoft AND supports NT authentication. Link takes you to a comparision chart of features. (Not Reviewed)

You have 1,000,000 records in your customers table....

Custom Log Shipping

One of our favorite authors is back with a great how-to on log shipping. This isn't the baked in log shipping, this is a code your own solution that gives you a starting point for your situation. Even if you don't need it now, it's worth looking at to gain a better understanding of how shipping works.