Michael Francis

SMTP POP3 & PST. Acronyms from Hades.

A busy SysAdmin will occasionally have reason to curse SMTP. It is, certainly, one of the strangest events in the...

12 February 2010 3 min read

Laerte Junior

Exceptional PowerShell DBA Pt 3 – Collation and Fragmentation

In this final look into his everyday essentials, Laerte Junior provides some useful scripts for the DBA that use an...

11 February 2010 15 min read

Jaap Wesselius

Hyper-V R2 Live Migration

Reliability is one of the great payoffs to virtualization, and failover clustering has got a whole lot better with Windows...

10 February 2010 11 min read

Bart Read

How much will .NET Reflector Pro cost?

Somebody asked about this on our beta support forum earlier, so I thought I’d mirror the information I posted in...

09 February 2010 1 min read

Johan Veldhuis

A Deep Dive into Transport Queues (Part 2)

Johan Veldhuis completes his 'Deep Dive' by plunging even deeper into the mysteries of MS Exchange's Transport queues that are...

09 February 2010 14 min read

Jonathan Medd

Using VMware vCenter Update Manager to keep your vSphere Hosts Up-To-Date with Patching

The chore of patching operating systems and applications is taking an increasing proportion of the time of a system administrator,...

09 February 2010 15 min read

Ben Lye

Active Directory Snapshots with Windows Server 2008

Snapshots are a useful feature of Windows Server 2008. Taking a snapshot of Active Directory as a scheduled task can...

09 February 2010 7 min read

Tony Davis

A Plea for Plain English

The English language has, within a lifetime, emerged as the ubiquitous ‘international language’ of scientific, political and technical communication. On...

05 February 2010 3 min read

Louis Davidson

Creating and using a Time (not Date) Table/Dimension

Haven’t posted anything useful in a while, so I figured I should. This was something I was building for a...

04 February 2010 9 min read

Paul Nielsen

Switching rows and columns in SQL

When they use SQL Server, one the commoner questions that Ms Access programmers ask is 'Where's the TRANSFORM/PIVOT command? So...

04 February 2010 4 min read

Buck Woody

Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 Performance Tuning Task List

In which Buck Woody imagines how the US military would have tackled DBA checklists for 'mission-critical' databases. And having imagined...

04 February 2010 3 min read

Kathi Kellenberger

Writing Efficient SQL: Set-Based Speed Phreakery

Phil Factor's SQL Speed Phreak challenge is an event where coders battle to produce the fastest code to solve a...

04 February 2010 31 min read

Josef Richberg

Simple Query tuning with STATISTICS IO and Execution plans

A great deal can be gleaned from the use of the STATISTICS IO and the execution plan, when you are...

04 February 2010 21 min read

Phil Factor

Finding Stuff in SQL Server Database DDL

You'd have thought that nothing would be easier than using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for searching through the DDL...

04 February 2010 24 min read

Richard Morris

Peter Norvig: Geek of the Week

It's likely that you are already using the results of Peter Norvig's work every day, if you search the internet...

03 February 2010 11 min read

Robert Sheldon

Implementing User-Defined Hierarchies in SQL Server Analysis Services

To be able to drill into multidimensional cube data at several levels, you must implement all of the hierarchies on...

02 February 2010 13 min read

Bob Cramblitt

SQL Search- The Search and the Sequel

It started out as an experiment to try to explore different ways of creating a software tool that people would...

02 February 2010 8 min read

Andrew Siemer

Getting Spark View Engine to work with ASP.NET MVC

Method not found: ‘Void System.Web.Mvc.ViewContext..ctor(System.Web.Mvc.ControllerContext, System.Web.Mvc.IView, System.Web.Mvc.ViewDataDictionary, System.Web.Mvc.TempDataDictionary)’ I am finding that there are several complaints about getting Spark View...

31 January 2010 2 min read