(Andy Warren) If you’re read my assorted articles over the past couple years you’ll know that I’ve done a fair bit with transactional replication. I wouldn’t call myself an expert with it, but I’m comfortable using it in production and dealing with the minor mishaps that occur. Still, there is alway

(Brian Moran) In the land of Not So Long Ago, the DBA was the hero of the IT shop. The DBA determined the content, internal structure, and access strategy for the IT shop’s database; defined security and integrity rules; and monitored performance. But in the land of Here and Now, the up-and-coming h

(Brad M. McGehee) One of the biggest hardware bottlenecks of any SQL Server is disk I/O. And anything that we, as DBAs, can do to reduce SQL Server’s use of disk I/O will help boost its performance. Some of the most common things DBAs do to reduce disk I/O bottlenecks include: –Tuning queries to

You cannot install SQL Server 2000 on a computer that runs Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and that has Terminal Server installed on a server cluster. After you provide all the correct information to SQL Server 2000 Setup (and provide the VirtualServer name, IP address and licensing information), you

(Sean Maloney) Congratulations on your new job! You are the new database analyst for MedicalDb Company, and the CEO is making you responsible for selecting and implementing a secure patient-records privacy solution. Success means that your solution works well, saves the company from expensive li

(Brian Moran) My SQL Server logs contain messages such as “2003-12-01 21:34:56 50 spid51 Starting Up Database ‘IhateSpam’.” Is it typical for SQL Server to constantly restart all my databases? (R,$)

(Leo Peysakhovich) Every DBA knows that databases should be backed up. SQL Server provides some powerful mechanism for the database backups called ‘Database Maintenance Plan’ to support scheduled full and log backups. It is easy to create a plan to backup all user and system databases. The probl

(Don Schlichting) Microsoft application developers have often been faced with the decision of using a database engine they liked, versus an engine that was affordable to ship with the completed product. In many cases, the price point wins, and the database standards are changed to accommodate the lo

It’s impossible to truly tune a SQL Server without a good understanding of its performance profile and work load. This white paper describes techniques and procedures to assess the baseline performance profile of a SQL Server, benchmark the performance of the server under varying work loads, and

If the SQL Server cluster resource is in an "online pending" state and the cluster service sends a termination request to the resource, the resource may not successfully come online again on the node until the cluster service is restarted. The cluster service usually sends a termination request t