(Ruben Heetebrij) The Wizard can take care of all the formatting and lead you through the creation of a Web page step by step. In addition, you can point SQL Server’s Web Assistant Wizard at the tables that contain the data you want to retrieve or monitor. Thus, query skills are not required eit

(Drew Georgopulos) Permissions are restricted in most environments. Even in development environments, only members of the sysadmin and serveradmin fixed server roles can execute the sp_sdidebug and sp_addmessage extended procedures to grant use of SQL Server’s debugger and custom error messages, lea

(Trey Johnson and Pam Barker) This is the first of a two-part series walking you through the new performance management solution, Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Solution Accelerator. Part 1 focuses on the architecture and construction of scorecards.

(David Poole) There is a very good reason for having user acceptance testing over and above unit testing and formal testing of you code. As a developer, you will test your code for the things that you expect to be trapped. A professional tester will take the functional requirement specification and

(Marcin Policht) In this article of our series presenting SQL Server 2000 Security, we are turning our attention towards Data Transformation Services. If you are not familiar with this topic, it might be helpful to first review its coverage on the DatabaseJournal Web site. The referenced information

(Morris Lewis) For at least 50 years, magnetic tape has been the medium of choice for long-term data storage, and nothing is likely to completely replace tape in the near future. However, increasingly, organizations are backing up databases to a hard disk before copying the file to tape because the

(William Pearson) In this lesson, we will introduce a commonly used numeric function in the MDX toolset, the AVG() function. The general purpose of the AVG() function, as we shall discover, is to return the average of the tuples occupying a set. We will consider elementary uses of the function in th

(Brian Moran) I need to store integers—account numbers and other IDs—that have 20 or more digits. Storage and retrieval of these integers needs to be accurate, with no rounding, so I can’t use the float data type. I’ve seen recommendations to others in this situation to store the integers in a CHAR(

(Leo Peysakhovich) Recently I faced a task, as a part of regular maintenance, to rebuild all the indexes in the databases. Nothing special, but that instance of SQL Server has anywhere between 200 and 400 databases. Each of them is fairly small but it takes hours to rebuild indexes manually or even

(Sanjay Agrawal, Surajit Chaudhuri and Vivek Narasayya) Automatically selecting an appropriate set of materialized views and indexes for SQL databases is a non-trivial task. A judicious choice must be cost-driven and influenced by the workload experienced by the system. Although there has been