Help a Student
One of our community is working on a thesis for his graduate degree on the effects of outsourcing on knowledge transfer among software engineers. He's got an anonymous survey setup, so if you have a few minutes, lend a helping hand.
The Challenge: Litespeed v TDPSQL
Choosing a backup solution can be a trying exercise with all the various add on products these days. New author David Bird gives us some insight into his testing and decisions with a look at Litespeed and Tivoli's Storage Manager.
Handling Zero Byte Files in DTS
SQL Server 2005 has substantially enhanced its ETL capabilities, but many people will still be working with DTS in SQL Server 2000 for many years. New author James Greaves brings us a technique for working with imports and handling files that might not have any data.
Healthcare Data Models Matter
Healthcare applications come and go, but data live on forever. We’ve seen that since the beginning of the computer industry; when we move from legacy systems into more “modern” architectures, we often leave behind applications, but we almost always take along the data into the future. Even though data are so important, we in health-IT don’t seem to spend the quality time necessary to structure our schemas and databases in such a way as to make it easier to maintain in the future. We often don’t design our data models solidly, and we don’t test them well by putting them through simulations or design them for multiple versions.
Lookup Table Madness
Are you mad? Not angry, more like crazy when it comes to designing databases in SQL Server? Don Peterson has met a few people he thinks are just that when it comes to building lookup tables. Does it stem from poor understanding of database design? Or do you disagree? Read Don's case against this particular design practice.
Ronni Colville on Configuration Management Databases
Gartner has stated in the past that "configuration management is at the very heart of IT service management." What do you mean by this?
Free SSIS Events and Code Camp
There are a few upcoming SQL\SSIS\Developer events coming up in the next week. Andy Warren and Brian Knight will be speaking at Code Camp in Orlando (a free full day event) and Brian will be doing a SSIS event in Philadelphia. For more information, see this blog post.
Ten of the Biggest Mistakes Developers Make With Databases
You may be wonderfully up-to-date with an AJAX Web interface or the latest whizbang Windows user interface, but under the covers, you're probably still pumping data in and out of a database, just as we all did a decade or more ago. That makes it all the more surprising that developers are still making the same database mistakes that date back to those good old days of Windows 95 and before.
Jump Start Your SQL Server 2005 Learning
There are many changes in SQL Server with the release of SQL Server 2005, but none more telling than the client tool used to manage your servers. Check out this new e-book for learning about SQL Server 2005 Management Studio form SQLServerCentral.com.
Are Your Database Backups Current and Available?
It is an interesting question and one I hope every DBA can answer positively. New author Thomas LaRock brings us his method for ensuring that the backups have occurred and the files are still on disk.
Blogs
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
Forums
XACT_ABORT being set to ON by web services
We have two "identical" instances of an ASP.NET web service (or so I have...
OPENQUERY Flexibility
Comments posted to this topic are about the item OPENQUERY Flexibility
A Full Shutdown
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A Full Shutdown
Question of the Day
OPENQUERY Flexibility
Which of these are valid OPENQUERY() uses?
See possible answers