(Vicky Chau) Businesses rely heavily on databases for day-to-day transactions and for business decision systems. In today’s information age, databases form the critical core of enterprise business processing & information systems. (pdf)

(Hilary Cotter) The best way to improve merge replication performance is to run merge agents as frequently as possible. However, if your Subscribers are offline, running merge agents will not always be possible, and you should urge users to synchronize frequently instead. The following tips will hel

After you install Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4), you may notice that the blocked column in the sysprocesses system table is populated for latch waits in addition to lock waits. Sometimes, you may notice brief periods of time when a single server process ID (SPID) is reported as bloc

(Don Schlichting) In last month’s article, Controlling Transactions and Locks in SQL 2000 and 2005 – Part 1, transactions (the smallest unit of TSQL work) were introduced. ACID, the acronym that governs transaction integrity, was used as the framework for transaction behavior. In order for a tra

(Serdar Yegulalp) Data transformation service (DTS) packages are groups of SQL Server tasks that involve accessing and changing data (such as copying data from one database to another, writing it to a file and bulk inserting records). You can run DTS packages manually, execute them in the contex

Consider the following scenario. You create a query that uses the UNION ALL operator more than 255 times. You submit this query from a client application to Microsoft SQL Server 2000. In this scenario, a stack overflow exception may occur, and SQL Server unexpectedly closes. When this problem occurs

(Larry Chesnut) Well, it’s been awhile since I have had the time to write something new on our Yukon, err SQL Server 2005 blog site, and I apologize for the absence. But hey, a guy has gotta pay the light bills once in awhile with some paying work. After being out in the field at customer sites for

(Dinesh Asanka) Database comparison and synchronization are frequent operations that most of do in our daily work as a developer or DBA. Tulasoft LLC has released a tool called SQL Examiner for the above purposes. There are several third party tools available for you to perform these same tasks for

When you enable trace flag 828 on a computer that is running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4), checkpoint resumes the behavior that it exhibited before you installed SQL Server 2000 SP3.

(Gregory A. Larsen) Every once in a while, an event might happen that corrupts a database. We have all made a stupid mistake at least once that has trashed a database. When this happens what do you do? If you do not have a database backup, then you had better own up to the problem you caused and tel