The May SQL Server Standard
Better late than never, here's a look at the May issue of the SQL Server Standard, now available as a PDF.
Quickly Viewing Available Space
As everyone moves to SQL Server 2005 from SQL Server 2000, there are quite a few pieces of information that have moved and may give you trouble finding. Boris Balinger brings us a followup to his first look at some of those changes with a quick article on how you can get the free space in your database files.
Strategy, Tactics, and Business Intelligence
There is a lot of talk these days about “business intelligence” (BI for short). Pick up any magazine aimed at business or technology professionals, and you’re sure to read about things like data warehouses, dashboards, cubes, ETL, SCD, and a seemingly endless list of other specialized terms and acronyms. One might be left wondering, is this something to which I should be paying attention?
XML - Good and Bad
XML is becoming more and more the mainstream for data transfers between systems. Web services and SOAP communications are built into SQL Server 2005, requiring the more and more DBAs understand how to work with XML. Raj Vasant has written a number of articles on XML and brings us a look at how XML should and should not be used.
Jacksonville Free HA Event From Microsoft and SQLServerCentral.com
If you're in Jacksonville next week, whether you’re a developer, DBA or manager, you’ll get something out of this all day SQL Server free event. This event is being run with Microsoft and Idea Integration (Brian from SQLServerCentral.com) and will be at a detailed tech level (no marketing). This all-day session is designed to Get You Started with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 High Availability and gotchas when upgrading to 2005. High availability is a hot topic for most enterprise customers. Any application downtime can impact your business, resulting in revenue loss, customer dissatisfaction, and damaging creditability of their business. These 300 Level sessions will be mostly demos! When you leave this, you should know how to mirror a database and cluster. RSVP required.
SQL Server Performance Testing
This (new) design bothered me. It violated one of the fundamentals that I'd learned and read about for years; namely keeping the primary key small and narrow. It also looked like it would be difficult to maintain. Finally, after arguing back and forth about the merits and drawbacks of each of the designs, we decided that testing them was the only way to be sure
Data Driven Subscriptions
Reporting Services is a great subsystem for SQL Server that fulfills quite a few needs. However just like SQL Server, there are some features that are limited to the Enterprise Editions, something that not every user can afford to implement. New author Jason Selburg brings us a way to implement subscriptions to reports using Standard edition.
SQL Server 2005 Integration Services - Transaction Support - Part 25
The latest article in our series discusses improvements in the transactional support implemented in SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. The more granular scope of transactions, which now can be assigned to arbitrarily designated Control Flow tasks and containers, makes it is possible to limit their impact or execute several of them in parallel. However, even with this improved functionality, you need to keep the blocking issues they might potentially introduce in mind.
Foreign Keys
Foreign keys are an important part of a relational database. New author Ravi Lobo takes a look at foreign keys from the perspective of a new DBA with some scripts to help you ensure your database is setup correctly.
Talking Technical
Should IT managers understand technical issues, or is a full appreciation of the technology somehow unworthy and unnecessary for senior staff? In such a rapidly changing industry where fortunes are made and lost by attempting to exploit gaps in the market too thin to see with the naked eye, the answer would seem obvious. However, I have repeatedly come across amazing gaps in the technical knowledge of managers.
Blogs
Advice I Like: Pyramid Schemes
By Steve Jones
If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a...
Using Prompt AI for a Travel Data Analysis
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
FinOps for Kubernetes: Leveraging OpenCost, KubeGreen, and Kubecost for Cost Efficiency
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
Forums
Database file shrink issue.
Hi experts, I have a 3+ TB database on a 2019 sql server which...
The North Star for the Year
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Multiple Escape Characters
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Escape Characters
Question of the Day
Multiple Escape Characters
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code (in a database with the appropriate collation):
SELECT UNISTR('%*3041%*308A%*304C%*3068 and good night', '%*') AS 'A Classic';
What is returned? See possible answers