Microsoft SQL Server 2000 hotfixes will be packaged and delivered to users as a self-extracting executable file. The Hotfix installer helps you install hotfixes by using a GUI based setup program. By using the Hotfix installer, you can also automate the hotfix installation process across your whole

(Ravindra Okade) Now that SQL Server 2005 is almost here, it is time for you to read up on and apply some of its new features to your databases. Many of the new features are pretty straightforward (synonyms, for example), but some are less so.

(Eli Leiba) This article describes an alternative way of passing a varying number of input parameters from one T-SQL stored procedure to another by using the built-in OPENXML T-SQL row set statement in order to parse a given XML string. (R)

(Michael Schmalz) Before I started using Microsoft Access heavily, I did analysis work with PivotTables in Excel. Moving over to Microsoft Access, I found that using cross tab queries allowed me to do similar work but not to the same degree of detail. When I made the next leap to SQL Server, I w

(Chris Cathers) When I got done reading Stephen Lasham’s article Extracting a String Within Delimiters – Part 2, I thought that I would share with the community, some functions I had just written a couple weeks earlier. I have found that I do a lot of string parsing where I work. It turns out that I

(Rick Dobson) SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, the SQL Server-based enterprise reporting solution Microsoft released in January 2004, is positioned to become one of the most popular SQL Server components. Nearly all organizations need to produce reports from their data, and with Reporting Service

(Baya Pavliashvili) If you use SQL Server authenticated logins to connect to databases, the following scenario should sound familiar: you backup the database on the production server, restore it on the development/test server and the application doesn’t work. What’s wrong? You immediately check

(Ken Henderson) This article explains how to use PSSDiag, a diagnostics collection tool for SQL Server. PSSDiag is one of several Microsoft Product Support Services tools recently released to the Web that are now available for personal use

(Andy Warren) If you’ve set up replication without immediately updating (or even queued updating in SQL2K) subscribers, you may see this error if you allow write access to tables on the subscriber. If a user inserts a record into the subscriber, then later that same key is generated on the publisher

(William Pearson) Over the years that I have spent implementing enterprise Business Intelligence applications, I have found many uses, ranging from "simple to sublime," for conditional formatting. At its most basic, conditional formatting can be used to identify exceptional data in a report. Example