(Burton Rodman) If you develop SQL databases, you know how difficult it can be to promote from the development environment to production with any level of confidence that the databases are the same.

(Muthusamy Anantha Kumar) SQL Server Database administrators often generate SQL Statements and execute the generated SQL statement in order to simplify certain tasks. It has always been a twin operation. This article illustrates how to use un-documented stored procedures to execute the generated SQL

(Arthur Fuller) Star ratings are often used in film, hotel, and restaurant ratings. However, I worked on a project recently that used the star ratings scale to identify how critical a problem is; for instance, the more stars, the more urgent it was that the problem be addressed. This led me to wonde

In this SQL code snippet we go over a method to do a search and replace on text fields within a SQL database. This code came in particularly handy when converting over from DNN 1.x to DNN 2.x where the portal directories changed from a long hex based GUID to a simple integer value.

(Serdar Yegulalp) Unicode is one of the most broadly-accepted standards for storing data using a mixture of international character sets. It has been available in SQL Server since version SQL Server 7.0. However, if you are not careful in managing how data is sent to SQL Server, mixing Unicode’s mul

(Vidya Vrat) This article provides an overview of new feature support built into Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Just for a quick byte, SQL Server 2005’s most exciting feature is .NET Framework integration, which will be detailed in later section of this article. For some features, this article assumes t

(William Pearson) In an earlier article, Black Belt Components: Ad Hoc Conditional Formatting for OLAP Reports, as well as within other articles of the Reporting Services series, we have discussed conditional formatting in general, and have set out to examine approaches to meeting specific business

(Marcin Policht) In this article, we are continuing coverage of Foreach Loop container functionality, by discussing different types of loop enumerators. So far, we have presented methods for working with files in a folder as well as records in a recordset (using Foreach File and Foreach ADO enumerat

(Jeremy Kadlec) If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a free data modeling tool is worth a terabyte of data. That is just what you get with the SQL Server 2000 DaVinci data modeling tools. SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager has a number of hidden goodies, and the DaVinci tools seem to elude m

(Merrill Aldrich) One important component of tuning a large, heavily used database, is to ensure that the tables are indexed optimally: enough indexing, but not too much indexing for the application you are running. There are rules of thumb about index tuning, but the entire issue is so complex that