SQL Server Magazine

Sharpen Your Basic SQL Server Skills

Discover the difference between Windows Authentication Mode and Mixed Mode, and learn the names and uses of installed system databases.

Sharpen Your Basic SQL Server Skills

Sharpen Your Basic SQL Server Skills

Get answers to your questions about SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration tools that can help you protect the SQL Server surface area from security breaches perpetrated by unauthorized users or applications.

Sharpen Your Basic SQL Server Skills

More answers to DBAs' questions. What’s the difference between dividing an integer with NULL or zero, or between a unique constraint and a primary key constraint, or between decimal and numeric data types? And how do you retrieve random rows from a table?

Sharpen Your Basic SQL Server Skills

Server backup doesn’t have to be complex. With these simple commands you can perform full, transaction log or incremental, differential, and file backups. Plus you’ll learn commands for recovering files and when to do a tail-log backup.

Sharpen Your Basic SQL Server Skills

Sharpen Your Basic SQL Server Skills

DBAs get answers to basic Structured Query Language (SQL) questions on the difference between FILLFACTOR = 0 and FILLFACTOR = 100; ISNULL and NULLIF; clustered index and nonclustered index; % used as wildcard and % used as operator; TRUNCATE and DELETE.

Sharpen Your Skills: Joins, Groupings, and Data Types

Learn the difference between UNION and UNION ALL; INNER JOIN and OUTER JOIN; DISTINCT and GROUP BY; NVARCHAR, VARCHAR, and CHAR; and timestamp and GETDATE().

Sharpen Your Skills: Joins, Groupings, and Data Types

Sharpen Your Skills: Routines and Clauses

SQL Server often features several ways to do the same or similar tasks. To select the best technique for the job, you need to understand the differences.