New author Mike McCallum spent a week in London at the 2005 SQL Server DevCon conference. It's a smaller event than the PASS Summits, but if it fits your travel or schedule plans better, take a read and see what he thought. With training budgets tight and SQL Server 2005 bringing a completely new paradigm, knowing all your training options is a good thing.
2005-03-14
3,509 reads
A mind is a terrible thing to waste and so is the vast quantity of untapped data structure meta information available free for the using in any XML document. This semantic data available in XML is like gold lying on the ground ready to be scooped up and cashed in with little or no effort. This is meta information that can be utilized immediately to significantly increase the value of the raw XML data. By automatically utilizing this valuable structure meta information, hierarchical fourth generation languages (4GLs) can nonprocedurally process XML's complex multi-leg hierarchical structure. This significantly increases the usefulness of the data and makes it immediately available for use at its enhanced value. This article describes the semantics of hierarchical data structures and how they can be automatically utilized by 4GLs.
2005-03-14
1,424 reads
Aggregation, which is commonly used to deliver reports to users, often also delivers poor performance. To help guarantee that you're delivering the best performance possible, you should explore different versions of the query and pick the best one. This month, look over Tom Moreau's shoulder as he shows you how to work with multiple-child aggregations.
2005-03-14
2,413 reads
SQLServerCentral.com tries to provide you a great deal of value for your subscription fees. We think we do a good job considering the $0 cost 🙂 One of the benefits we sometimes negotiate is a discount on products. DBXtra has generously offered a discount for the next few months, so read on and make your purchase today!
2005-03-11
2,895 reads
With the release of SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft finally makes a commitment to developer-centric reporting. They've integrated the design-time environment integration with Visual Studio and enabled report delivery through Web browsers, PDFs, Excel, and XML. Learn how to make this tool work for you.
2005-03-11
2,085 reads
Squeezing every last bit of performance from SQL Server is an art and one that can be critical to your success as a DBA. New author Mike Metcalf has brought us a little nugget he learned at Devcon recently about procedure cache hits and misses.
2005-03-10
9,765 reads
Most database developers dread including such navigation features as paginated reports, hierarchical navigation, filtering, and full-text search because the amount of time they take to develop is not proportional to the utility or interest they create. In addition, connecting individual pages and controls to the database is mind-numbing work. Since writing SQL is non-trivial in any circumstance, it typically requires a specialist DBA's involvement.
..... As Web-based applications proliferate to bring more functionality directly to end-users, writing every SQL statement for every web-based application in your shop is likely to become a never-ending Sisyphean task for your DBA.
2005-03-10
2,209 reads
Performing routine database maintenance such as reindexing is important for keeping your databases running at peak performance. When you use INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements to modify table data, indexes can become fragmented. Index fragmentation can happen when the logical sequence of pages is disrupted or when an index page contains less than its maximum amount of data, creating a gap in the data page or index. As indexes become fragmented, you get inefficient data reads when accessing tables and slower database performance.
2005-03-10
3,919 reads
This chapter covers the building blocks available to the database designer and database user to create and modify database objects and data. The SQL Data Types will be covered along with data representation as literals (constants) and expressions.
2005-03-09
3,385 reads
After discussing authentication and authorization behavior of SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 in the previous two articles of this series, it is time to look into other security-related changes. In particular, we will focus on the freshly introduced native database encryption capabilities. While some encryption functionality existed in the previous versions (e.g. involving column encryption APIs within User Defined Functions or PWDENCRYPT password one-way hash function), it was relatively limited and rarely used. SQL Server 2005 provides significant improvements in this area.
2005-03-09
3,566 reads
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
We have two "identical" instances of an ASP.NET web service (or so I have...
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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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