Ensuring your SQL Server is performing well is a large part of any good DBA's job. It is not just writing good queries, but also monitoring your server and getting alerts on critical issues. Mike Metcalf has brought us a great article that shows how you can setup performance alerts and be notified via SMTP.
SQL Server 2000 introduced user-defined functions (UDFs), and they were immediately hailed as a great tool for encapsulating repetitive code, as well as allowing you to perform more complicated processing directly in an SQL expression. On its face, that claim is valid. You can certainly improve readability and maintainability with UDFs. But cleaner code will be cold comfort if your queries bog down and lock up your server.
One of the less exciting, but perhaps very powerful new features in SQL Server 2005, the Service Broker is an asynchronous communications method. MVP Srinivas Sampath brings us the second part of his series looking at what you can accomplish with a practical example.
How much backup data should you keep around and what are the implications? Part 2 of a series looking at backups and their implications.
DTS was one of the most amazing new features of SQL Server 7 and in SQL Server 2005 it has been renamed to Integration Services. This component has some incredible new capabilities, many of which come at a steep learning curve. New author Kristian Wedberg brings us a basic article and some code on how you can SSIS to generate test data.
SQL Server Database administrators often generate SQL Statements and execute the generated SQL statement in order to simplify certain tasks. It has always been a twin operation. This article illustrates how to use un-documented stored procedures to execute the generated SQL Statements directly.
We've had a lot of coverage of dynamic sql (including another great one from Robert Marda later this week) but this one is a little different. Done in a question/answer format, Andy tries to explain to junior developers why dynamic sql is to be avoided, how to do so, what to do when you can't.
Newly surfaced Tableau Software aims to revolutionize the acquisition and deployment process with its product suite, Tableau Professional and Standard Editions. To a significant degree, it has succeeded...
Who builds SQL Server? It's an interesting collection of individuals and we're looking to bring you some profiles of the entire team. Brian Weckler, reporting services guru, is the subject of this interview.
We will use SWITCH() to enact conditional formatting in a couple of different ways. First, we will use it to drive formatting of a value to meet requirements that are based upon the magnitude of the value itself. As a part of our practice with SWITCH() to achieve our ends, we will delve into a popular formatting convention for negative (and other "outlier") numbers.
By Steve Jones
We’re a week late, once again my fault. I was still coming out of...
By Steve Jones
I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece...
By Steve Jones
I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this...
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Adding and Dropping Columns I
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