The new Windows Powershell not only provides flow of control, but the strong typing of its variables and expressions enables you to manipulate them and create scripts that leverage the .NET Framework.
The Database Tuning Advisor (DTA) is an improvement over the old Index Tuning Wizard. Learn how to access the advanced features of DTA from the command line with a custom configuration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The article describes how to trap, analyze, and graph performance data.
A theoretical discussion of the meaning of data normalization and related concepts.
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.
Author Bio
