SQL Server has a rock solid backup and restore routine. However, it is not the most efficient way of handling the backups and restores. Neither in terms of time or space required. A number of software vendors have developed their own additions to SQL Server that accelerate or compress the backups (or both). New Author Wesley Brown has taken four of these products into his environment and run some comparisons. Read part one of his review.
With some recent hubub and questions, Steve Jones decided to spend a few moments welcoming everyone to the community and give some background on what this site is all about.
SQL Server clusters are great tools to ensure that your servers are highly available. However there are some times when you'll want to manually perform a failover for testing, maintenance, etc. New author Anthony Bressi brings you a technique and code to allow you to use VB 6.0 to build a small program to automatically do this.
If you are running Microsoft SQL Server databases to support critical enterprise applications, you are part of a growing trend. The cost/performance benefits of Microsoft SQL Server on the Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000 platforms have fueled the growth of SQL Server as a platform for enterprise-class applications.
Transactions in SQL Server are probably no more complicated than those in other RDBMS products, which is to say they are fairly complex. Don Peterson continues with part 3 of his series and takes a look at transaction isolation levels and how they interact with multiple connections and their impact on locking.
This is the twenty-fifth article of the series, MDX Essentials. The series is designed to provide hands-on application of the fundamentals of the Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) language, with each tutorial progressively adding features designed to meet specific real-world needs.
SQL Server 2000 is easy to administer relative to other RDBMS, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. Author Andre Vigneau has built a database toolkit to allow him to manage his cross platform databases. This is the second article in his series and deals with establishing connections to any database platform.
Have you ever wondered if you could start the execution of a stored procedure (SP) asynchronously from some T-SQL code? What I mean is starting the SP in the background and continuing on with the next line of code in your T-SQL script without waiting for the execution of the SP to complete. If so, then this article might be of some interest to you.
The default location for the SQL Server system databases doesn't always meet the standards of many organizations. Author Chris Hedgate has taken the time to put together a short checklist on how you can move the master, msdb, model, and tempdb databases easily.
The system table, "sysperfinfo," is the representation of the internal performance counters of SQL Server. This article demonstrates how to retrieve and store information from "sysperfinfo" to a CSV file, so that it can be analyzed.
By Steve Jones
This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...
By John
Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...
By Bert Wagner
Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Happy Holidays, Let's Do Nerdy...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item UNISTR Escape
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating Tomorrow
In SQL Server 2025, I run this command:
SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C\3068 and good night', '*') as "A Classic";
What is returned? (assume the database has an appropriate collation)
A: 
B: 
C: 
See possible answers