Past SQL Server 10-Minute Solutions
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Regulatory mandates like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA dictate changes to your data elements. Leverage SQL Server's extended properties to maintain the synchronization between your documentation, database objects, and code base when such changes arise.
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Without the use of SQL Server's debugger or Raiserror during development, you're on your own for error handling. Learn two solutions for testing your stored procedure code under these tough conditions.
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Part II of this DTS task series illustrates how the author used multi-step DTS packages to build a solution that consolidates an indeterminate amount of Excel data in one SQL Server table. The solution repeats this process so it catches updated data, and it executes once for each Excel file.
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SQL Server 2000's DTS offers a copious—even bewildering—bundle of pre-packaged tasks. This 10-Minute Solution, the first of a two-part series exploring DTS tasks, illustrates how to chain different types of tasks together to collect the information you'll need to process data contained in a file location table. This technique is particularly useful in environments that require "after the fact" data updates.
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You need certain data values to complete a database-programming job, but you don't know where they're located. What can you do? Follow this 10-Minute Solution to navigate through an unfamiliar database, and locate and extract the table and column names that house your values.
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The sheer number of objects in a database makes keeping track of them difficult. As your system grows in complexity, identifying the objects' dependencies and their purposes can quickly become confusing. Adopt a naming convention that limits the ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding an object and its purpose.
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Learn how to determine the state of your indexes and understand whether that state should be changed. See how evaluating the construction and location of your system's indexes and deciding whether to adjust their fill factors and padding can improve the system's performance.
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SQL Profiler is a great SQL Server tool that can help you reach your database optimization goals. This 10-Minute Solution presents a few preparatory steps to start using Profiler for monitoring performance problems. It discusses some techniques, tools, and commands that reveal information about server behavior.
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This article describes how to apply locking, coding, and transaction management in a way that strikes the correct balance between concurrency and integrity while avoiding deadlocks.
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The article describes how to avoid out-of-space errors with the appropriate setup, sizing, and maintenance to keep logs from growing out of control. You'll also learn how to set up monitoring facilities that will catch unexpected errors for you.
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The article describes how to create and utilize user-defined functions in SQL Server 2000.
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The article describes how to preserve the metadata and data content of test and production databases in a development environment without the database size requirements inherent in those environments.
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SQL Server has added powerful capabilities to the recovery process, such as creating a standby database. Unless you know how to use the RESTORE command properly, however, you risk losing data.
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The article describes four different methods of backin up a SQL Server database; when to use them and why.
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This 10-Minute Solution describes two ways of giving end users direct access to query a database using views.
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The article explains how to automatically calculate when the next (or next N) business days are from a given date by calculating and storing this type of information in SQL Server. You will learn more about how SQL Server handles dates and about its functions.
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This 10-Minute Solution describes many of the extra details that will help you create a better data recovery plan.
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SQL Server 2000 provides a new feature called 'recovery models.' The article describes how to make the best use of this feature to simplify your backup strategy.
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Describes the steps you should follow to set up a comprehensive backup plan.
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The article describes a simple process for assessing and mitigating risk from data loss.
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In this 10-Minute Solution, Joe Lax demonstrates how to use Dynamic SQL to process those changes and apply them to the second database.
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How best to capture changes that have occurred in a database using triggers.
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Property functions are new to SQL Server 7.0 and are used to query various details or properties about the objects in your database. This 10-Minute Solution explains the COLUMNPROPERTY and DATABASEPROPERTY functions.
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There are three property functions for querying the attributes of database objects: OBJECTPROPERTY, COLUMNPROPERTY, and DATABASEPROPERTY. This solution looks at the OBJECTPROPERTY function and describes the kind of data you can retrieve with it.
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To specify the number of records that are returned by a query, you can use either SET ROWCOUNT or the TOP keyword.
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The sp_OAMethod stored procedure is used to call an object method. The article explains some of the problems you could encounter and how to work around them.
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The article describes the SQL Server OLE automation stored procedures and how you can use them to access an object's properties.
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SQL Server 7 provides another method for obtaining metadata: the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. The article introduces these views and shows how they can provide critical information about your database.
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The article describes a basic understanding of the metadata in a database. Though theoretical in nature, it can be used to solve complex problems.
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There is a way to reduce the complexity of a system by reducing the number of tables. This reduction is accomplished by consolidating tables based on their domains.
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How to trap, analyze, and graph performance data.
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A theoretical discussion of the meaning of data normalization and related concepts.
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Explains a technique to eliminate the need to write your own cursors to accomplish common database administration tasks, such as running the DBCC (database consistency checker) routines to update index statistics or to run a backup of a database.
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This article warns of the dangers of using identities and triggers together.
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In version 7 of SQL Server, each database contains a table called sysfiles that stores a row for each file used by the database. The article describes how to obtain a list of all files associated with SQL Server?
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Part 3 of a three-part article on triggers in SQL Server. It provides an approach to coding and debugging triggers and discusses the features that added in SQL Server version 7 regarding triggers.
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The changes that Microsoft has made to SQL Server version 7 are great enough that how you will function as a database administrator could change significantly. Here are some areas that DBAs might want to investigate.
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Part 2 of a three-part article on triggers in SQL Server. The article discusses when and why we use triggers and the technical details of how to write a trigger.
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Part 1 of a three-part article on triggers in SQL Server. An overview of triggers in SQL Server: When to use them, how to debug them, and more.
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Microsoft SQL Server is a great database for Web sites, especially Web sites deployed on NT and using Microsoft's IIS server. It's easy to install, relatively cheap, and interacts well with IIS. Here's a checklist to ensure your deployment runs smoothly.
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