The Complexity of Managing a SAN
This article from Veritas does a good overview of the complexities involved in managing a SAN. SAN's are here to stay, even if you don't have one, you should be reading about them.
Managing Jobs - Part 4
Andy has been busy lately on a project you'll be hearing more about soon (!), but he did manage to get part four of his managing jobs series done. This article discusses ideas for patterns to follow when building jobs, including writing to the console, setting errorlevels, and how to get them installed on the server. DBA's, if you're not developers, look at this article - this is stuff you can take to your development team and get better/more manageable jobs.
Deleting Child Data Based Upon Criteria in the Parent Table
New Author! Thom's first article discusses the difficulties you encounter when your database doesn't support cascading deletes (or you've opted not to use it) and you need to delete data in a child table based upon a value in the parent table. Not exactly your run of the mill delete query. Take a look and please rate/comment the article!
SQL Server DTS Best Practices
This article discusses various SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) best practices. It is divided into sections like DTS naming conventions, DTS documentation, troubleshooting DTS packages, improving the performance of DTS packages, securing DTS packages, DTS resources.
Managing Max Degree of Parallelism
Herve has done some work experimenting with max degree of parallelism (DOP) on some large multi processor blocks and based on that, has some recommendations for you if you're using more than 8 processors. Good reading!
SQL and IIS on the same Box?
David takes us through why he believes trying to run SQL and IIS on the same box is a bad idea. It's a common notion that it IS a bad thing to do, but you have real justification? Read this and you will!
Free BCP GUI
Pedro Estrada has published a free tool that according to his site "This is a complete application to have an easier interface to work with BCP against MSSQL servers. Just specify a server, database, table user name and password to BCP out or IN." Worth a try, and he has some other free utilities (some SQL, some not) on the site.
UDF as Computed Column
UDF's are useful if somewhat tricky. Dinesh uses a common scenario where you have a self referencing table (the common example is an employees table where each employee has a managerid that links to another employee in the same table) to illustrate how a UDF can make querying easier, how to use it as the basis of a computed column, and how to index that column.
myLittleAdmin for MS SQL and MSDE released !
myLittleTools.net is pleased to announce the release of myLittleAdmin, the most advanced and robuste web-based MS SQL and MSDE database administration tool. This new version offers a new skinnable interface and a lot of great new features, such as user levels, multi-databases support or SQL script generation. A lite version is available for free so that you can test it in your own environment. Use myLittleAdmin and do through a browser almost everything you did before with Enterprise Manager.
In the Real World - Lost Data Chains
How do you deal with problems in the real world? What steps should you follow? A new series looking at actual experiences at work. This one looks at a weeklong adventure in troubleshooting SQL Server applications.
Blogs
Webinar: Navigating the Database Landscape in 2026
By Steve Jones
For a number of years, we’ve produced the State of the Database Landscape report,...
Claude AI Convinced Me Not to Build an iPad App
By Steve Jones
I coach volleyball and I do a lot of stat stuff on paper. I...
A New Word: Dolorblindness
By Steve Jones
dolorblindness – n. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s...
Forums
The Power of Data and Privacy
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What's the Date?
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Two New Shortcuts for Fabric Lakehouse Developers: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Two New Shortcuts for Fabric...
Question of the Day
What's the Date?
In SQL Server 2025, there is a new function that returns the current date without the time. What is it?
See possible answers