(b_hardman) This is a small project to generate classes for accessing stored procedures via a webservice, born out of frustration with SQLXML 3.0

(Jamie Thomson) A common requirement when building a data warehouse is to be able to get all rows from a staging table where the business key is not in the dimension table. For example, I may want to get all rows from my STG_DATE table where the DateID is not in DIM_DATE.DateID.

(Muthusamy Anantha Kumar) In OLTP environments, you often find batch jobs that move historical data to archive tables. In addition, there are often some batch jobs that purge historical data from the OLTP tables. These types of jobs can perform a lot of transactions and create additional overhea

(Don Peterson) Over the years I have had a number of “discussions” about the practice of creating generalized “lookup” tables for storing multiple code types in a single table. I won’t keep you in suspense about my view of this practice; the idea stems from a failure to learn and appreciate the f

(Gregory Larsen) How many times have you had problems sending SQL MAIL or SQL Agent Mail from SQL Server because the Exchange server was taken down or not working? Have you ever tried to connect up SQL Mail and/or SQL Agent mail to Exchange through a firewall or across domains, only to find out that

(Paul Bertucci) Want your SQL Server apps to stand up to industrial use? In this sample book chapter, you’ll learn a rather formal approach to assessing and choosing a high availability solution. As you’ll learn, the key to success is doing as complete a job as you can on the assessment and usin

(Peter O’Kelly) Last month’s Trends & Analysis column provided an overview of database management system (DBMS) trends and the reasons why DBMSs have a resurgent and expanding role in the broader application platform landscape. This month’s column assesses Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 product lin

(Darren Green) The File Watcher Task does what it says really, it watches a folder waiting for files. When a file is found the task completes, returning the name of the file found in the task’s ExecValueVariable. The created and changed events are both monitored, so new files and changes to exis

(Balaji Rathakrishnan, Christian Kleinerman, Brad Richards, Ramachandran Venkatesh and Vineet Rao) This paper describes how database application developers and architects can take advantage of the CLR integration features in SQL Server 2005. It compares CLR-based programming with existing programmin

(Daniel Pfaff) There are lot of situations where you need an exact timestamp. For example, you may want to differentiate a recordsets’ creation dates, store technical measurements, or just to see how fast your latest SQL is running. Coding the 4th dimension is another common task, and therefore mill