(Joe Chang) Many production databases today are in the tens or hundreds of gigabytes in size. That size is not a problem for production hardware. However, developers generally like to work on their personal computers, including notebooks with limited disk capacity, so a 10-100GB database size is an

(Erik Pace Birkholz) In the fast-paced, caffeine-powered, and sometimes reckless world of computer security, the security analogy of a "hard crunchy outside and soft chewy inside," a staple of the security community today, is uncannily apropos as we spend millions to protect and fortify the outside

(Marcin Policht) A few more DTS Designer tasks are left to cover out of a total of 17 existing in SQL Server 2000 Data Transformation Services implementation. Arguably, the one that has undergone the most significant changes since the SQL 7.0 release is the Transform Data Task. In this article, we w

(Vinod Kumar) Most DBA’s in various organizations are confronted with this simple little feature during their normal database-monitoring carrier. Most often the effects of the same are not realized unless we see the side effects of the same in the production code machines. This article would take yo

(Brian Knight) So you’ve created a SQL Server package and now you’re ready to integrate it into your Visual Basic application? A common scenario for this is where you don’t want a client to have direct access to SQL Server Enterprise Manager. Instead, you can send them a Visual Basic executable to p

This article demonstrates how to use two different methods using SQL Distributed Management Objects (DMO) to return dates formatted to a specific regional locale. By default, the date format for SQL server is in U.S. date format MM/DD/YY, unless a localized version of SQL Server has been installe

(Gregory A. Larsen) How many times have you had more than one way to do something and wanted to determine which method was faster and/or which one used more resources? I am going to guess that most developers have run across this dilemma more than once. So how do you decide with method is faster–or

(Scott Bekker) Microsoft posted a minor update this week of its free Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) for download from its Web site. MBSA 1.2 is the first new version in about a year of the tool for locally or remotely identifying common security misconfigurations and scanning for mi

(Bob Beauchemin) All versions of SQL Server prior to SQL Server “Yukon” provide two ways to write procedural code that executes inside the database. The usual way is to use Transact SQL (T-SQL), a proprietary implementation of a portion of the SQL standard known as persistent stored modules (SQL/PSM

SQL Server 2000 checks whether the security identifier (SID) or group membership SIDs of the user have been specifically denied access to the server. If so, the user will not be granted access to the server. If the user is not specifically denied access, the server checks whether the user has been g