By Aviv Zucker, 10/22/2009
If you need to enforce business rules on multiple tables, try indexed views, which let you join tables and enforce uniqueness on the result set.
By Mitchel Sellers, 10/22/2009
The PIVOT statement is a great tool for presenting data in an easy-to-read format, but it has one key limitation: You must know about and include all the column names in the PIVOT ...
By Michael Otey, 10/20/2009
Improvements in performance and scalability in ESX Server and Hyper-V are making SQL Server a viable candidate for virtualization.
By Tyler Chessman, 10/20/2009
Use these techniques and sample reports to get answers to your most frequently asked reporting questions.
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 10/15/2009
Itzik discusses a set-based and a cursor-based solution to a T-SQL concurrent sessions querying problem, as well as the performance and scaling ramifications of both solutions.
By William Sheldon, 10/14/2009
Locking down your database environment can be a difficult task, but it doesn’t have to be. Learn how to protect your databases by using service accounts and encryption to secure ...
By Eli Leiba, 10/12/2009
In SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005, one of the easiest ways to encrypt and decrypt strings is to use T-SQL's ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE and DECRYPTBYPASSPHRASE functions.
By Saravanan Radhakrishnan, 10/12/2009
A DBA was asked to produce a list of dates in which there were no transactions from a database that included only the dates in which there were transactions. Here's how he pulled ...
By Kevin Kline, 10/08/2009
Track database growth across multiple SQL Server instances using this CLR stored procedure.
By Andrew J. Kelly, 09/28/2009
When is the right time to defrag? Ultimately, the answer is up to you, but keep these considerations in mind.
By Michael Otey, 09/03/2009
Get the basics on SQL Azure, formerly SQL Data Services, Microsoft’s SQL Server-based database cloud offering.