Using sysforeignkeys to discover SQL Server circular relationships. Have you ever tried this? Most of us probably haven't, but Jeffrey Yao often needs to reverse engineer databases for his clients. Here's a followup to his first article where he presents another of his techniques for doing a little detective work in your databases.
SQL Server has a great backup and recovery architecture, but you have to know how to properly configure and use the server to ensure that you will not be seeking new employment anytime soon. A few of the Sonasoft team have written this short piece on strategies for setting up your backup jobs to ensure recovery in the event of a disaster. Welcome new authors Bilal Ahmed, Kiran Kumar, and Vas Srinivasan.
SQL Server has an abundance of third party tools, more being developed everyday. Indepth for SQL Server allows you to monitor the performance and activity on your SQL Server. New author Hiram Khakharia looks at this product from Veritas.
A key service pack has now been released for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. This one adds key enhancements and fixes many bugs.
The Unique Identifier datatype in SQL Server has tremendous potential to solve many of the issues one finds with Identity fields, other primary keys, etc. However it also has some drawbacks and limitations. Author Sharad Nandwani looks at some of the pros and cons of this datatype.
How many of you dig into Windows XP extensively? Working with hardware and the OS isn't something that many DBAs deal with these days. Most companies have an admin to work on servers, hardware, workstations, etc. But sometimes you need to help yourself out. Steve Jones had to work to get his laptop back after an XP disaster. Read on and hopefully this will help you one day recover your system.
In this follow up Andy looks into some of the options available when you're dealing with situations where you're joining a case sensitive column to a case insensitive column. We think after reading this you'll be ready to just say no!
SQL Server backups are rock solid. But checking them is another matter and something that every DBA is responsible for doing. Another followup article by new Author Kevin O'Donovan to the issue of looking at which database
The SQL Server ports 1433, was blocked recently by an ISP. New Author Denny Figuerres read our release and decided to bring you some comments about why this isn't such a bad idea. Read on and see if you agree that blocking the SQL Server ports shouldn't present you any problems.
See what a reader had to say about Part 1, make sure you've read Part 2, then feel the pain as the author describes a lookup table that should have had unique values and doesn't.
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
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I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
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