When you try to send an e-mail message by using the xp_sendmail extended stored procedure on a computer that is running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later, the xp_sendmail extended stored procedure may not run successfully. You may receive the following error message: Serve

(Itzik Ben-Gan) As with any software, SQL Server contains many back doors and other undocumented features that programmers use. Using only documented and supported features has many benefits: Your code is less prone to failures, you can more smoothly upgrade to newer SQL Server releases, porting you

(Andy Warren) It’s funny how the smallest things can trip you up. Stop and think for a minute – if one of your developers requests a column be added to a table, how much effort do you (or should you) expend to make sure it won’t break anything? (R)

(William Pearson) In Part I of this article, we returned to the objectives of an earlier subseries, Reporting Options for Analysis Services Cubes. As we stated in that set of articles, our focus was to respond to a constant request from readers: to explore options beyond the Analysis Manager / Samp

(Mark Kaelin) Achieving and maintaining optimal operational performance is the holy grail of every database designer and administrator who has created a normalized table. And, like that elusive icon, the search is seemingly never-ending and all-consuming. Before you can optimize a SQL Server dat

(Marcin Policht) In our previous article, we started discussing basic principles and applications of the Transform Data task. We will continue this topic here, focusing on its more advanced features. So far, we have described the purpose of four of the tabs of the Transform Data Task Properties dial

(Suhil Srinivas) This article has been written with keeping in mind of the large number of developers who do not have access to the SQL Server beta 1. Often, I feel that there are plenty of developers who hear and read about the new yet to be released products but have not means to look at them. Alt

(Brian Moran) A reader sent in a T-SQL query because it didn’t work as he expected. He was unable to concatenate 0 with the WHEN ‘1’ branch of the CASE statement. The T-SQL code is supposed to explicitly convert the integer value ‘2004-09-24’ to a char data type, but the result remains an integer va

(Christoffer Hedgate) One of the best known third-party products in the SQL Server arena is Log Explorer from Lumigent Technologies. I am not saying every DBA has it in his toolbox, but most of us have heard about it. It is the only tool (that I know of at least) that connects directly to the transa

(Frank Kalis) Consider this article a very basic introduction to an area in which countless multi-hundred paged books have been written during the last four decades. This article can not and does not intend to compete with any of these books, but rather tries to explain different database models in