May 12, 2001

Correct installation of Server service on Windows NT4 for SQL

It is especially important to correctly set Windows NT4’s Server service in “Application Server” mode to ensure that the Server service doesn’t absorb all the available hardware resources while providing network services for file management. As its name suggests, when in “Application Server” mode, resources are managed in a way

Enumerate all the indexes in a SQL Server database

The indexing schema plays a fundamental role in performance tuning, and tools such as the Index Tuning Wizard that can suggest efficient schemas on the grounds of a database usage. Once the indexing schema has been completed, you should document it in order to know which tables have primary keys,

How to restore a SQL Server database marked as “suspect”

At times a database appears to be marked as “suspect” in the Enterprise Manager. SQL Server marks a database as suspect with it can’t access the database. What happens at a low level is that SQL Server sets one of the bits in the status field in the sysdatabases table.

Monitor stored procedure and batch activity from remote workstations

Using the sp_user_counterX stored procedure (where X is a number between 1 and 10) you can set internal SQL Server counters. This values are read by the Performance Monitor, the standard Windows utility that monitors system activity. The Performance Monitor is able to monitor not only the activities like these,

Send fax from SQL Server using Microsoft Word

This article explains how you can create a Microsoft Word document from T-SQL and fax it through a method exposed by its Automation object model. You can create and destroy OLE Automation object using the sp_OACreate and sp_OADestroy, whereas you can use the sp_OAMethod to invoke a method, and the

Make several SQL Server connections partecipate to the same transaction

You can reuse resources from other connections by resorting to two little known SQL Server’s stored procedures, which allow several connections to share the same transactional space: sp_bindsession and sp_getbindtoken. In particular the sp_getbindtoken stored procedure lets you retrieve the current transaction’s token (a string that identifies its own transactional