Rod Colledge Reliable Storage Systems for SQL Server By validating the IO path before commissioning the production database system, and performing ongoing validation through page checksums and DBCC... 12 May 2010 12 min read
Phil Factor Exploring SQL Server table metadata with SSMS and TSQL Phil shows how to start squeezing powerful magic from SSMS for doing a detailed exploration of the metadata of your... 29 April 2010 21 min read
Jonathan Lewis Oracle to SQL Server: Crossing the Great Divide, Part 1 When a SQL expert moves from Oracle to SQL Server, he can spot obvious strengths and weaknesses in the product... 28 April 2010 23 min read
Rodney Landrum Consolidating SQL Server Error Logs from Multiple Instances Using SSIS SQL Server hides a lot of very useful information in its error log files. Unfortunately, the process of hunting through... 14 April 2010 15 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Basic Defensive Database Programming Techniques We can all recognise good-quality database code: It doesn't break with every change in the server's configuration, or on upgrade.... 31 March 2010 36 min read
Joe Celko Celko’s SQL Stumper: Eggs in one Basket Joe Celko reveals the winner of his Easter Stumper: the puzzle of designing an apparently simple database to deal with... 29 March 2010 13 min read
Buck Woody Mission Critical: Database Design There is nothing like a checklist to make sure you've completed all the tasks in designing a database, and there... 18 March 2010 3 min read
Phil Factor Exploring your database schema with SQL In the second part of Phil's series of articles on finding stuff (such as objects, scripts, entities, metadata) in SQL... 02 March 2010 23 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Defensive Database Programming Inside this book, you will find dozens of practical, defensive programming techniques that will improve the quality of your T-SQL... 22 February 2010 3 min read
Joe Celko Procedural, Semi-Procedural and Declarative Programming in SQL A lot of the time, the key to making SQL databases perform well is to take a break from the... 15 February 2010 10 min read
Buck Woody Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 General Maintenance There is nothing that beats a simple checklist for ensuring that things don't get forgotten in the Database Maintenance process.... 15 February 2010 3 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
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
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
Rodney Landrum Managing Data Growth in SQL Server 'Help, my database ate my disk drives!'. Many DBAs spend most of their time dealing with variations of the problem... 21 January 2010 37 min read
Brad McGehee Database Maintenance Plans in SSMS: An Overview Maintenance plans are essential. Microsoft provide two tools, the Maintenance Plan Wizard and the Maintenance Plan designer, to assist the... 06 January 2010 23 min read
Richard Morris Itzik Ben-Gan: DBA of the Day Itzik Ben-Gan, who was one of our first Geeks of the Week in 2005, is so well known and popular... 06 January 2010 17 min read
Robert Sheldon Five Basic Steps for Implementing an Analysis Services Database To learn an application, nothing beats getting it up and running. Getting started with Analysis Services can be frustrating unless... 05 January 2010 18 min read
Robert Sheldon Working with the bcp Command-line Utility Even though there are many other ways to get data into a database, nothing works quite as fast as BCP,... 10 December 2009 35 min read
Barry King SQL Server Partitioning without Enterprise Edition Table partitioning is a valuable technique for managing very large database tables. It has always been possible with SQL Server,... 10 December 2009 6 min read
