The Smart Guide to Building World-Class Applications
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In this issue, we explain why and how to unit-test your stored procedures, introduce a "poor man's" SQL Server monitoring solution, explore tried-and-true techniques for working with NULL values in Visual Basic .NET and ADO.NET, and much more!
By William Vaughn
Here's how to use the IsNULL() function in T-SQL to avoid returning NULL values from your queries.
By Brian Moran
SQL Server 2000's extended properties let you define and manipulate user-defined properties. You can use these user-defined properties to create a homegrown data dictionary.
Developers need to know how to test for and set NULL values in their applications. Here are some tried-and-true techniques you can use in Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET.
To transform tables, Brian Moran explores a handy trick that uses the GROUP BY clause.
By Michael Otey
None of SQL Server’s upcoming programming-productivity enhancements will have more impact on DBAs than the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). This new capability begs the question, “Which .NET language should DBAs learn?”
By
Here's how to use the ROWCOUNT setting to divide a long update into batches and maintain good performance.
How can you add a column to a replicated table without reinitializing the entire publication? The SQL Server Development Team has an answer.
By Itzik Ben-Gan
You can use date and time manipulations for calculating call costs across different rate periods as long as you stick to the basics.
Readers write in about the difference between the smallint and tinyint data types and about being sensitive to case in code.
Manually checking and defragmenting your database's tables can be a laborious process. Here's how you can eliminate fragmentation from the start and how to automate defragmentation when you need it.
By Rich Rollman
Inserting hierarchical data from an XML document into relational tables that have primary key/foreign key relationships can be difficult. Read on to see how you can use OpenXML's @mp:id meta-property to overcome the challenge.
By Mark Solomon
If you use Microsoft Access data access pages, you might encounter problems with a 30-second default timeout if your queries run slow. Here's a tip for avoiding the problem.
Think UNION is useful only for combining results from different sources? This tip shows that using UNION is sometimes the quickest way to select from just one table.
When setting up a SQL Server monitoring solution, a DBA team discovered that their queries weren't performing as they'd hoped. Here's what they did about the problem.
By Herts Chen
Manually customizing replication agent job steps speeds up snapshot replication, but it's impractical for a large-scale environment. Learn how to automate this customization in the last article of a three-part series.
Monitoring software for SQL Server can be costly. But you can implement a “poor-man’s” monitoring solution and view SQL Server performance data on the Web.
By Carolyn Mader
Check out the latest SQL Server-related new and improved products.
By Kalen Delaney
Large data objects can be tricky to store and even trickier to access again. Here are some pointers that can help you make sense of it all.
By Dan Sawyer
You're the one on the front lines; who better to drill your code to peak performance? Here's why and how to put stored procedures through their paces.
Michael Otey revisits SQL Server’s six major releases, then looks to the future and the upcoming Yukon release.
You have to license all your processors, even if you aren't using all of them to run SQL Server.
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