In the more social professions (like healthcare, politics, and education), emotions are vital. If you don't have people skills, then you're basically just not qualified for the job.

In professions...

opc.three (4/4/2013)

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Eric M Russell (4/4/2013)

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Case in point: Just this morning I was asked to rename a database (AbcCorp -> AbcCorpOld) in the DEV and QA environments and then...

This is beginning to sound like the "Why do we need Cursors?" debate. Just like cursors, I'd be highly sceptical why anyone would need to leverage xp_cmdshell in a stored...

Steve Jones - SSC Editor (4/3/2013)

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Very interesting discussion.

Opc.three, you did bring up a few good points, but this isn't one of them.

opc.three (4/3/2013)I understand how xp_cmdshell works but if...

If your application or user accounts are members of the sysadmin role, then it's like having a house full of kids and then leaving the gun cabinette unlocked.

However, most...

I understand why xp_cmdshell would would be disabled in a non-dedicated environment hosted by a 3rd party. In that case there is a clear distinction between the database owner and...

jfogel (3/25/2013)

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Good point but the writings of Frank or King were one offs and of value from the start. Important information will migrate to new storage methods so it is...

There are some settings that arn't just tweaks; they fundamentally change the behaviour of SQL Server and should be chosen based on the case usage of the database:

Optimize for Ad...

Steve Jones - SSC Editor (3/21/2013)

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In a practical sense, it doesn't matter if it's cat videos or anything else. We still need to manage the data, which means work for...

Eric M Russell (3/21/2013)

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Good point.

How percentage of...

Good point.

How percentage of total data consists...

On MSDN and TechNet, there are various visual guides that present a high level overview of the SQL Server architecture stack and then drill down to more detailed technical articles....

I don't understand why a script to scan across all tables in a database would be needed. Generally speaking, we know ahead of time if we're looking for a customer...

Here is one technique I use when there is a need to perform bulk deletes on a large table. It is not an online operation, but it should be able...

That's a denial of service type attack that I hadn't expected, but it is an interesting attack vector. I wouldn't expect this to impact servers, but if servers are consuming...