How often do you check your SQL Server tables for fragmentation? How often do you defragment them? This is one of those technologies that has been available for disks for a long time, but now is here for SQL Server. Norb Technologies is offering a discount to the SQLServerCentral.com community on this product.
One of the lesser used features of SQL Server is the ability to access the functionality in various DLLs using a COM interface. Dinesh Asanka brings us a basic article with a few examples in how you can work with COM components from inside SQL Server 2000.
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?
Building a highly available system is hard. This short white paper from Sonasoft shows some of the differences between a cluster and their standby server product.
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.
By Steve Jones
Redgate recently released SQL Compare v16, which included a new feature to work with...
By Steve Jones
I was listening to the radio the other day and the hosts were discussing...
By Steve Jones
We’re a week late, once again my fault. I was still coming out of...
Looking to confirm my understanding of these three products and how they can be...
In one of my environments I have 3 pairs of Always On SQL 2022...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Learning From Breakage
I have this table in my SQL Server 2022 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CityList] ( [CityNameID] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1), [CityName] [varchar] (30) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GOI decide to add two new columns for the StateProvince and Country. What code should I use? See possible answers