(Trey Johnson and Pam Barker) This is the second of a two-part series walking you through the new performance management solution from Microsoft, Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Solution Accelerator. Part 2 focuses on bringing the scorecard to life and porting the information to a portal.

(Andy Warren) For those of you who have an MSDN subscription you may have noticed that many of the downloads are now available as ISO images (basically a copy of the data as it exists on disk, sector by sector). Win XP makes short work of burning those images to CD as readable files, but so far

(William Pearson) Optimization of MSAS requires an in-depth knowledge of many factors, including the manner in which MSAS executes queries within the client/server architecture that embodies it. From the perspective of the cubes that MSAS produces, our primary concerns, from a performance standp

(Arthur Fuller) SQL Server allows only one clustered index per table because a clustered index reorders the table, arranging the data according to the index key. This results in wonderful performance–when you only have to worry about one particular column.

(Tom Davidson and Prakash Sundaresan) Starting with SQL Server 7.0, a central goal of the SQL Server development team has been to produce an easy-to-use system that requires little care for daily operations. To meet this goal, the team designed SQL Server to be a self-tuning system that dynam

(Serdar Yegulalp) Sometimes, a recordset will need to be returned with a non-standard sort order — something which isn’t possible with conventional sort or collation mechanisms. One example would be to have a zero in a numeric column placed at the bottom of the sort order, but to have everything el

(Itzik Ben-Gan) Back doors are undocumented features of an application that let you do things the application wasn’t intended to support. With this article, I conclude my series on T-SQL back doors by discussing three back doors to SQL Server views: rolling your own INFORMATION_SCHEMA views, cre

(Joseph Sack) Do you use Query Analyzer’s Graphical Showplan, SHOWPLAN_ALL, or SHOWPLAN_TEXT to performance tune your query statements? Most DBAs use one or all of these tools for troubleshooting query performance. But what do most DBAs look for when they examine the query execution plan results

(Bob Beauchemin, Niels Berglund and Dan Sullivan) Sql server 2005 includes new Transact-SQL (T-SQL) functionality. The enhancements span the range from an alternative mechanism for transaction isolation to declarative support for hierarchical queries. And statement-level recompilation even improves

(Danny Lesandrini) The simplicity and popularity of SQL Server means that more and more developers who build applications with Microsoft Access will want to learn how to take advantage of server side processing using SQL Server Stored Procedures. The following article will demonstrate a simple meth