Andy, where are you?
What happens when you have a day job, a web site, a new job at work, and a baby? Chaos! See what Andy's been up to the past few months. It's off topic from SQL of course, but it contains an interested bit or two.
SQL Server Security: Dealing with Anti-Virus Programs
Do you run an anti-virus product on your SQL Servers? After all, it's recommended, more and more, that you run anti-virus on ALL machines you have. There's just too much stuff running around out there. But putting this on a SQL Server creates some interesting issues. Our resident security guru, Brian Kelley, looks at some of the things you need to consider when deploying anti-virus products on your servers.
Overview of Performance
How can you tell if your code if performing well? Do you know what you want to look for when starting to analyze code? Here's an article from Leo Peysakhovich that looks at some of the things that you can use at a high level to improve the performance of your code.
Enhanced Query Analyzer
Here's a little replacement for Query Analyzer that appears to provide most of the functions, plus a few more. While we haven't given it a full review, at first glance it appears to do the job. Plus there's NO INSTALL!!!! Always a plus for me.
Hidden Dangers!
How many of you register a server in Enterprise Manager? Now how many of you click the "save password" box? Probably most of you. Are you aware of the security risks associated with this? James Travis looks at one of potential problems here and other security issues relating to SQL-DMO.
Application Development: SQL Server Yukon and CLR integration
Another look at how the next version of SQL Server will integrate and work with .NET technologies.
SQL Server Needs Incremental Updates
Although Brian likes that Microsoft delayed the next release of SQL Server for quality, he disagrees with the release strategy. See his opinion and argue your own!
Auditing Your SQL Server Part 4 - Selective Auditing
It's been some time and he apologizes. This next part of this series from Steve Jones looks at selective auditing changes to data on the server using a combination of methods presented in previous articles in the series. Read on if you have problems tracking changes to data on some tables, but don't want to implement a solution that tracks every change.
Capturing The Error Description In A Stored Procedure
Error handling is one of those things that is simple to do in SQL Server, but most people don't do it and it's not the most rebust thing. Here's another way that you can implement error handling in your stored procedures from a new author Amit Jethva.
Building Joins the Easy Way
Have you ever built a join graphically using Access or Visual Studio? Did you know that you can do this with the native SQL Server tools? And it's easy! Follow along as Dale Corey shows you how.
Blogs
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
The FinOps Lifecycle: From Budgeting to Reporting
By HeyMo0sh
Working in DevOps long enough teaches you two universal truths: That’s exactly why I...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers