(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.

(Gregory A. Larsen) When a column in a row contains a NULL what does this mean? So what is a NULL? Is a NULL value a zero, space, or something else? From a SQL Server perspective a NULL is not a value, it only means that a value was not provided when the row was created. Special considerations need

(William Pearson) In this article, we will begin our exploration of chart reports with an examination of the humble pie chart. While virtually all of us have interacted with these kinds of charts before, (if not in the context of report authoring, then almost certainly as an information consumer), w

(Neil Boyle) When transferring a database to a new server using backup/restore or detaching and re-attaching database files, the link between server logins and database users almost invariably gets broken. Here we will take a look at why this happens, and what we can do to fix it. (R)

(Surajit Chaudhuri, Kris Ganjam, Venky Ganti, Vivek Narasayya, and Theodore Vassilakis) This paper describes the Fuzzy Lookup transformation and Fuzzy Grouping transformation in Data Transformation Services (DTS) for SQL Server 2005. Fuzzy Grouping transformations are useful for improving data quali

(Vinod Kumar) This is an question that came up in the newsgroups to how fo we find the size of tables and indexes in the new version of SQL Server 2005. The solution to the same was using some of the DMVs (Dynamic Management Views) that have statistical information of objects. And for this case we u

(Baya Pavliashvili) Log shipping is one of the failover solutions offered by SQL Server 2000. In this context, failover means substituting primary server with a backup (sometimes also referred to as standby) server if the primary hardware becomes unusable. Failover solutions can also be used to prov

(Michelle A. Poolet) DBAs today are learning to adapt to operational changes in organizations that are working harder to serve the needs of their customers, clients, or members. Organizations must collect and manage different kinds of data in more complex ways than they might have in the past. I

(Steve Jones) As most people know, Microsoft is moving forward with the next evolution of SQL Server, AKA Yukon, AKA SQL Server 2005. The product is being developed and coincides with the Visual Studio 2005. However the next Beta, Beta 2, which TechEd 2004 attendees were allowed to sign up for, will

(Matt Newman) In this article I plan to demonstrate how to insert and read data from a SQL Server or MSDE database. This code should work on both SQL Server , I am using 2000, and MSDE. I am using Visual Studio 2002, but this should work with Visual Studio 2003, Web Matrix, and the command line SDK.