(William E. Pearson, III) In this article, we will continue our examination of MDX optimization techniques, begun in the article prior to the last, MDX Optimization Techniques: Introduction and the Role of Processing, and continued in the last article, MDX Optimization Techniques: Further Control of

(Muthusamy Anantha Kumar) Whenever database administrators begin new jobs or to administer and manage new SQL servers, the first step is to take inventory of the server. This includes information like Operating system, Service packs, physical memory, virtual memory etc. In this article, I explain ho

SQL Server marks a database suspect if any of the device files for the database are unavailable when it attempts to start. You may see either of the following sets of messages in the SQL Server error log.

(Michelle A. Poolet) Supporting a recursive relationship—like you find in a typical bill of materials (BOM)—is one of the hardest problems to solve in relational databases. A BOM is a hierarchical structure that describes relationships among components. For example, a car is made up of component

(Christoffer Hedgate) Even though SQL Server is very good at more or less automatically maintaining most statistics, physical data structuring and configurations etc (especially compared to some of it’s competitors), there are still some situations where you need to perform a little manual work to h

(William Pearson) In this lesson, we continue a “triptych” of articles that expose set functions that deal specifically with subsets – that is, each function returns a subset of a larger set as part of its operation. Having covered the Head() function in the previous article, we will introduce t

(Dan Appleman) Anyone who uses the Web is familiar with the two common forms of authentication. The most common one is “form-based” authentication, in which you enter some sort of user ID and password on a form. The Web application then authenticates you based on some internal scheme, and typically

The memory that SQL Server uses during sorting and hashing operations is allocated from the buffer pool as a stolen buffer. Stolen buffers must always remain in the virtual address space. They cannot be unmapped to a Microsoft Windows 2000 Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) location. SQL Server uses

SP1 includes a variety of improvements to the inital product release. Documentation for this release is provided in the SP1readme_lang.htm file which can be downloaded below or found in the Reporting Services installation directory after Setup is complete. To view a list of the bug fixes in SP1,

(Ron Talmage) Split-mirror backup technology can help you achieve higher database availability by letting you back up the database very quickly, typically in a matter of seconds. This speed lets you make database backups more frequently. Also, you can restore a database from a split-mirror backu