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.

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.

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?

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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No Defaults Passwords Ever

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Introduction of OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = ON

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The Long Name

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Question of the Day

The Long Name

I run this code to create a table:Create table with unicode nameWhen I check the length, I get these results:Table with length of name shown as 132 charactersA table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?

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