Technical 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.

Technical Article

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.

SQLServerCentral Article

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.

Technical Article

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.

Technical Article

SQL Database Audit Tool released to beta

LockwoodTech has released a new sql tool that analyzes the SQL Server transaction log to passively audit a SQL Server database. You can track inserts, updates, deletes and full row level detail of past transactions (even before the tool was installed). Client supports powerful filtering, grouping and sorting of audit data.

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Fun with JSON

By ateraa

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Creating JSON II

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Engineer Lessons

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

Creating JSON II

On SQL Server 2025, what happens when I run this code:

SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG( N'City':N'Denver' RETURNING JSON)
GO

See possible answers