When you use the ORDER BY clause in a view, an inline function, a derived table, or a subquery, you must also specify a Top operator. If you try to use an ORDER BY clause and you do not specify a Top operator, the following error may be returned to the client: Server: Msg 1033, Level 15, State 1

(Steve Jones) Auditing is always a double edged sword. When you need to determine what happened, you want all the information that you can possibly have. However when you don’t have issues, you have this huge volume of information to wade through, most of which doesn’t really make sense. Balanci

(Daniel Turini) So, you are now the leader of a SQL Server based project and this is your first one, perhaps migrating from Access. Or maybe you have performance problems with your SQL Server and don’t know what to do next. Or maybe you simply want to know of some design guidelines for solutions usi

This article describes the process for automatically initiating replication over a dial-up connection. The process involves using a scheduled job to establish the dial-up connection and then perform the synchronization. This procedure is described in more detail in the “More Information” section of

(John Lynn) A well-designed SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services data warehouse can yield significant information when you analyze the data warehouse cubes, and many excellent client tools are available to help you navigate OLAP cube data. Business intelligence (BI) tools such as ProClarity Analyti

(Brian Moran) Microsoft’s unwillingness to document many valuable Database Consistency Checker (DBCC) commands has always been a pet peeve of mine. In SQL Server’s early releases (6.5 and 4.2), the “consistency checker” name was more relevant than it is in SQL Server 2000 and 7.0. Many early DBCC co

(Marcin Policht) In our series, so far, we have been discussing topics related to authentication, which establishes identity of a login attempting to access SQL Server. Starting with this article, we shift our focus to authorization, which takes place once the submitted credentials (in the form of a

This step-by-step article describes how to troubleshoot SQL Server 2000 Virtual Server setup failures. SQL Server 2000 Virtual Server setup operations might stop responding and you receive the following error message: Setup failed to perform required operations on the cluster nodes. This err

(Amit Jethva) How do you accomplish error handling in a stored procedure? 99.99 % of people will answer use @@ERROR. How do you capture actual error message of the error raised by SQL Server within a stored procedure? Such as: Server: Msg 547, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 DELETE statement conflicte

(Adrian Heald) An outsourced Department I have had some association with has recently completed negotiation of a contract extension with its service provider. As part of this new contract the capacity management function has moved back in house. Well, part of the capacity management function anyway.