Review of Transact SQL Desk Reference
Looking for a good (or another) TSQL reference? This might be the one. Bruce took a good look at it and points out both the good and the bad.
Quest Releases TOAD for SQL - Freeware!
Quest Software has recently released TOAD for SQL Server, a freeware version of its highly popular Oracle tool - TOAD
Changing Databases Using XML
Need to apply changes to customer (or internal) databases in a calm, controlled manner? Dinish proposes an alterative to standard scripts that uses XML and a small VB app.
Contest!
We've run contests from time to time over the past couple years and had a lot of fun doing it. This time we're trying something new, partnering with Red Gate. Lots of good prizes on this one!
Review of Lumigent Log Explorer v4
Chris (one of our regulars!) installed Log Explorer and took it for a test drive. Written up in our standard review format this will give you a very quick overview of what the product does.
An Introduction to Database Models
Frank returns this week with a good non academic overview of the different types of database models and some of the features/problems that are native to each.
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services Performance Guide
Analysis Services is slowly gaining in popularity and many of you might get drawn into setting up a server or developing a system based on this technology. Microsoft has released a performance guide to help you take performance into consideration from the beginning.
Optimize Your Applications
This article demonstrates that one way to optimize the data access portion of your app is to do the query once and cache the results. This is not advanced caching just something to get you started thinking about the possibilities.
SQL Server 2000 Best Practices Analyzer Beta
Microsoft has released a new tool to analyzer your SQL Servers and see how they conform to their list of common best practices. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Viewing the Hierarchy of Stored Procedures
In this short article that follows up on an earlier one that discussed dependency issues we have some code that will generate simple treeview type view of the relationships between procs. Mostly code, more so than usual, but we thought you might find the idea useful!
Blogs
Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art
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...
Simple Talks Podcasting in 2026
By Steve Jones
I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this...
SSMS 22 still inserting tabs instead of spaces
I’m not trying to start up a debate whether you should use tabs or...
Forums
Cumulative Update 23 - KB5074819 - Database Mail - No longer working.
Hi there, Has anyone else had any trouble with Database Mail in Cumulative Update...
Script Task execution error with HTTP request
I have a script task that tries to execute a HTTP request, which seems...
SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer...
Question of the Day
URL Safe or Not?
If I use BASE4_ENCODE() in SQL Server 2025, is the output URL Safe by default?
See possible answers