Nightmare Contest
Murphy's law has struck us all, as evidenced by the disaster entries we've received in the past. Imceda software, makers of Litespeed are sponsoring a new contest, looking for your nightmares.
Review: NGSSquirrel
NGS Software is in the security business and have been very successful in finding vulnerabilities in many products, notable SQL Server. They have used their expertise to build products to help you better secure your systems. Dale Corey looks at one of those products, NGSSquirrel, which does vulnerability assessment.
Think like a DBA
What do your programmers do with nulls? Do they know nullif, isnull, what about the powerful coalesce function? Do they think DBA's look at the world differently? Why, it's all code isn't it?
Database Change Management: An Automated Approach
SQL Server change management is tough. The tools don't integrate with version control systems, there isn't good administrative controls to enforce control, and often you need to buy a third party tool to make this work. New Author Darren Fuller takes a look at the various ways in which you can implement version control in SQL Server. This is part one of a four part series on version control in SQL Server.
Lookup Table Design
Designing a SQL Server database is a challenging task. Making decisions about how to build tables, their relations, etc. can be a full time job for any DBA helping to build an application. Lookup tables are a part of just about every application that you work with or build a back end for. Leo Peysakhovich brings us an article on database design that deals specifically with lookup tables.
SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 Is Out!!!
The highly anticipated Beta 2 of SQL Server 2005 aka Yukon, was released today (Monday, July 26).
Review: SQLCentric
Monitoring your SQL Servers is something every DBA must do. Checking job status, disk space, etc. is a frequent question seen in our forums. Pearl Knowledge Solutions has developed a product to help you easily setup monitoring on your servers from a web interface. SQLCentric gets 4 stars from author Bruce Szabo; read his detailed review on this fine product.
The Bowling Challenge
Know anything about bowling? Or writing hard core TSQL? Or test driven development? Even if you don't, this might be a good way to build those skills. Write a stored procedure that can score a bowling game and you might win one of our books and a shirt!
Comparison of Oracle Drivers
Oracle is usually a dirty word in the SQL Server community, but like it or not, lots of data resides in Oracle databases. And SQL Server is often used to gather this data together in a warehouse of some sort for spinning cubes, generating reports, etc. Haidong Ji looks at the various methods that you can connect to an Oracle driver and compares the speed of each. If you need to get data from Oracle, or may need to, this is the place you want to start.
Tutorial: Changing the Visibility Objects in Reporting Services
In the last tutorial in this series of Reporting Services tutorials we added conditional formatting to the report. Now that we have created our first report and have added a bit of flare to it, we will go ahead and make it even cleaner. In this very quick demonstration, we will go ahead and change the visibility of rows or columns based on given conditions.
Blogs
AI: Blog a Day – Day 3: LLM Models – Open Source vs Closed Source
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 2 , we learned introduction on Generative AI and Agentic AI,...
How to Parameterize Fabric Linked Services in Azure Data Factory for Azure Devops Deployment
Quite the title, so let me set the stage first. You have an Azure...
Deployment Pipelines in Fabric – What Are They?
By HeyMo0sh
In the realm of software development and content creation, the deployment pipeline serves as...
Forums
A Quick Restore
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A Quick Restore
Guarding Against SQL Injection at the Database Layer (SQL Server)
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Guarding Against SQL Injection at...
Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance can we have data compression = page
I have a quick question on Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance . Do we...
Question of the Day
A Quick Restore
While doing some testing of an application, I wanted to reset my environment after doing some testing with this code:
USE DNRTest BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' GO /* Bunch of stuff tested here */RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACEWhat happens if this runs, assuming the "bunch of stuff" isn't anything affecting the instance. See possible answers