(Barrie Sosinsky) There are some good reasons why you may want to explore using heterogeneous replication, but the best reason is that it allows an administrator to offer SQL Server to clients whose companies have a critical investment in other data systems. (R)

(William Pearson) In this article, we will return to a function we introduced in an earlier article, CROSSJOIN(), whose mission it is to combine two sets of dimension members into one. We will discuss how CROSSJOIN() works in general, and then discuss how its performance can become an issue in mediu

(Kimberly L. Tripp) SQL Server 2005 provides non-locking, non-blocking read consistency to your users via snapshot isolation. Find out when to use it to improve performance and reduce latency in your applications.

SQL Server 7.0 and later versions of SQL Server allow the addition of external data sources as linked servers. This feature provides access to distributed, heterogeneous queries against OLE DB data sources. When connecting to SQL Server, a cursor listing available tables can be returned with the SQL

(Don Peterson) Part 1 of this series introduced transactions in general and then examined SQL Server’s Transaction Modes and nested transactions. Part 2 dealt with error handling and its effect on transactions. In this article I will explore the ins and outs of Transaction Isolation Levels. So f

(Jim Duffy) SQL Server 2005 or "Yukon" is going to be a major SQL Server update containing updates to nearly every facet of the program, including T-SQL.

(William Vaughn and Peter Blackburn) This chapter details the installation and configuration of SQL Server reporting services, providing advice on testing and options for this useful function.

(Don Schlichting) In the previous month’s articles, Full Text Searching was introduced as a way to query strings with more refinement than the usual TSQL “like” or equal operator statements. With Full Text Searching, a new file system structure is created, storing key words from selected fields into

(Robert Davis) Running ‘DBCC INDEXDEFRAG’ on a table can be a big performance boost without the overhead of the full ‘DBCC DBREINDEX’ on high traffic databases. However ‘DBCC INDEXDEFRAG’ carries the overhead of having to specify each index by name or ID rather than just the table. This means your m

(Andre Vigneau) This is the second article relating to my Unified Database Toolkit. We have seen in the previous article, Unified Database Toolkit – Scheduling, a simple way to create jobs in Windows scheduler from within Microsoft database engine. But before we take a look at how this database tool