(Brian Moran) In June, I wrote about the effects that Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) has on SQL Server (see “Windows XP SP2 Defaults Break SQL Server Connections” at http://www.winnetmag.com/article/articleID/42854/42854.html ). Now that XP SP2 is dribbling out through Windows Update and other sour

(Marcin Policht) So far, in our series, we have been focusing on tasks geared towards configuration changes, which increased the default security level of the SQL Server 2000 installations. However, no matter how much time and attention you dedicate to this process, it is likely that sooner or later

(Rob Hawthorne) Microsoft’s free server tool, ADS (Automated Deployment Services), provides system administrators with a consistent way to deploy the Windows OS, but what about RDBMS deployment? Does setting up SQL Server on a number of servers mean you have to run setup.exe again and again, specify

(Vinod Kumar) Any database requirement would be to view the created objects definition. And SQL Server is no different here. And in the SQL Server 2000 world we used to use the simple system stored procedure as sp_helptext to view the definition. For all backward compatibility this command still

(Muthusamy Anantha Kumar) In a large IT department, it can be difficult to locate where new SQL Server installations were made and how many of those SQL Servers were patched, etc. This article explains how to scan the entire network to find which boxes have SQL Server instances running and how to id

(Mark Nash) It’s 13:30 AM and you get a call from the Applications On-Call person. Application XYZ is down, looks like an SQL Server problem. You find that a drive or database is out of space, causing the SQL Server to crash. Now the difficult part, find some free space and hope the SQL Server will

(graz) Continuous integration is a popular concept in software development right now. One of the key components of this is making sure you always have a clean build of your program. This can also be applied to database development. This article shows how to build a cheap, simple series of scripts th

(Allan Mitchell) SQL Server 2005 has made it a lot easier for us to loop over a collection and with each iteration do something with the item retrieved. In this article we are going to show you how to iterate over a folder looking at the files within and doing something with those files. In this ins

(Michael Otey) Clients commonly ask me how to bulk insert data into SQL Server from ADO.NET applications. There’s no easy answer to this question because ADO.NET doesn’t have any built-in bulk-insert objects. The most straightforward method for performing bulk-insert operations from ADO.NET is lo

(William Pearson) In this article, we resume the focus of a group of articles that began with Mastering Time: Change across Periods. In that article, as well as its immediate successor, Mastering Time: Period – to – Date Aggregations, we concentrated upon the Time dimension from the perspective