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.
Right out of the box, SQL Server 2005 does not install many of its services (such as SQL Server Reporting Services) or does not have features turned on by default (.NET integration), thereby reducing the attack vectors that hackers could use to compromise your data security.
Check digits–not to be confused with checksums–are often added to numeric identifiers such as customer and product numbers to reduce the chance of incorrect entries. Sequences of numbers are notoriously easy to mistype, and constraints alone generally won't do the job. In this excellent article, Lynn Fields shows you how to implement the "Cadillac" of check digit methods–the Verhoeff Dihedral Group.
The fourth part of Steve Jones series looking at employee retention. In this article, he examines a few techniques that can help the employee ensure their own retention.
One of the most difficult database operations to scale-up on high-end server systems is the network call. In fact, without special precautions, a high call volume database application can have severe negative scaling on large systems. It is suspected that this problem is more pronounced on NUMA systems than basic SMP systems. A NUMA system with 16 processors can have significantly lower throughput capability than an otherwise comparable 4-way SMP system.
Auditing, analyzing and documenting your SQL Server installation is becoming more important all the time, especially as more and more attention is being paid to the security of your environment. Chad Miller brings us a look at a framework and a sample document you can use in your environment to conduct an audit.
There is an important technique for creating truly agile databases that I haven’t seen in his writings; one which is well-known to DBAs, but little understood in the application development community – the use of database views to create a layer of abstraction between the normalized relational tables and the applications that use the data.
SQL Server 2000 has a great job and alert subsystem, but it doesn't do everything. There are times when you want to be notified that something has completed, or not completed. New author Frank Loschiavo brings us a way to ensure that when you run a query you are notified if and when it completes.
In this article, I will introduce a significant improvement that underlies the new Analysis Services development approach, the Data Source View. A Data Source View is a design-time object that makes its home in the workbench environment of the Business Intelligence Development Studio.
In testing your applications, one of the things that you often want to do is run through a list of all possible values for some particular piece of code. Eli Leiba brings us a method for autmatically generating all the possible permutations for input values.
By Steve Jones
I’ve been very happy with Docker Desktop for years, running it on both laptop...
By Rayis Imayev
(2025-June-15) Long gone are the days when a data engineer could simply focus on building...
By Ed Elliott
I recently encountered an interesting issue with ADF where the publish feature suddenly attempted...
If I configure remote access to 0 on my servers, am I right in...
What is the best way to set the schedule of a maintenance plan or...
The LA Data Platform User Group had a necessary speaker cancellation for the group...
I am trying to analyze a number of columns in a large table to determine the highest value for each row. In SQL Server 2022, we have the GREATEST function, which will return the greatest value from those columns passed in. How many columns can I include in an expression like this:
select GREATEST( col1, col2, col3, ...)See possible answers