Articles

SQLServerCentral Article

SSIS - Reusable Benchmark Harness

We all know testing is important, but face it, testing is not the highlight of anyone's daily work. And more important than testing your code the first time is regression testing after you have fixed a few bugs. Kristian Wedberg brings us a new article that uses SSIS to build a harness that allows repeatable testing of code and applying benchmarks to be sure that things are working as expected.

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2005-11-02

8,253 reads

Technical Article

SQL Server 2000 SP3 and xp_cmdshell Woes

The problems caused by the SQL Sapphire Worm, also know as the SQL Slammer, have caused many sites to do a quick upgrade to SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3). It includes the fix that prevents infection by the worm. While moving to the latest service pack is usually a good thing, to do so without thorough testing risks breaking a working application. That is exactly what happened to one of my clients over the weekend.

2005-11-02

2,068 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Visual Defrag for SQL Server Discount

How often do you check your SQL Server tables for fragmentation? How often do you defragment them? This is one of those technologies that has been available for disks for a long time, but now is here for SQL Server. Norb Technologies is offering a discount to the SQLServerCentral.com community on this product.

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2005-11-01

4,111 reads

Technical Article

Loving to Hate the Data Administrator

You can just hear it now: At the table down the hall, there’s a group of people having, (as it seems to you) yet another academic discussion on the merits of third-normal form and the structure of primary keys. You’ve heard many discussions like this before — it all seems so pointless. After all, doesn’t it just boil down to “create table” commands and a bunch of DDL? You mastered all that in your first DBA class. What could be so hard?

2005-10-31

3,688 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Simplify the Creation of XML from SQL Server Data

SQL Server 2000 had extensions built in to allow you to work with XML data, however, most installations did not work with it. XML has proven that it is a very powerful way of transmitting and working with data, but creating it from relational data has proven to be difficult. New author Hugh Lynch, CTO of Restricted Stock Systems, Inc. brin gs us a method for easily creating XML from your SQL Servers.

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2005-10-27

10,484 reads

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Upgrading Admin Queries

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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