(Don Peterson) Everyone knows that a transaction is defined as a “Unit of work.” The transaction completes only if all the individual steps are successful, otherwise it all rolls back as if nothing ever happened, right? That simple definition belies some devilishly complex behavior on the part of SQ

(James Yip) SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services from Microsoft is a great tool that offers a centralized approach to storing and rendering reports. It also allows users to view and download reports without installing additional software. But what’s most convenient for users is that reports can be sav

(Muthusamy Anantha Kumar) When a DBA is managing many different SQL Server boxes, it can be a tedious job to find the port numbers used by all of the SQL Servers. In this article, I would like to discuss several methods for finding the Port numbers used by SQL Server.

If you select the Per Processor licensing mode during a SQL Server installation, the licensing mode is incorrectly saved to the Setup.iss file as Per Seat. Furthermore, SQL Server Setup does not properly recognize the Per Processor licensing mode when you run an unattended installation.

(Robert L. Bogue) You can’t teach an old dog new tricks—at least that’s what the cliché says. Many developers intentionally try to be the “old dog” so they don’t have to learn new tricks. Some developers, even those who have been developing client server, Web-based, and smart client applications, st

(Dinesh Asanka) I personally believe that no matter how much you are knowledgeable in the technical arena, if you are not adopting best practices you will be lost in one day. We as IT professionals best practices have become order of the day. To achieve this, there are many tools around us which

When you change data in a subscribed table on the subscriber and the subscribed table is configured for queued updating in Microsoft SQL Server 2000, the data on the subscriber may be updated slowly.

(Serdar Yegulalp) Triggers make it easy to automatically synchronize the behavior of data between tables and across databases. But their performance can be drastically affected by things that might not be obvious at first glance. Here I’ll identify one command to reduce the impact of some unforeseen

(William Pearson) General optimization of RS’ performance is, beyond argument, one of the more important functions of the Administrator. In evaluating performance from various perspectives at the Administrative level, one readily useful source of information is the data we can obtain from the logs c

(Andrew Novick) SQL Server doesn’t have a Product aggregate function. A recent blog post by Karen Watterson pointed out that Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q89656: Simulating a PRODUCT() Aggregate Function discusses how to achieve the Product aggregate functionality using the POWER function. We