(Michael Otey) Using Database Consistency Checker (DBCC) commands can give you valuable insight into what’s going on inside your SQL Server system. DBCC commands have powerful documented functions and many undocumented capabilities that you might not know about. You can learn more about undocumented

(Itzik Ben-Gan) The T-SQL language in the upcoming version of SQL Server will provide more power and flexibility than previous versions. Additions and enhancements include error handling with the TRY/CATCH construct, SNAPSHOT isolation, and WAITFOR enhancements. Also important are the BULK rowse

(Kevin Kline and Baya Pavliashvili) SQL Server transactions are extremely powerful—they provide a way to incorporate business rules into your applications and protect data integrity. Behind the scenes, the transactions are implemented through the SQL Server’s locking mechanism, which we discussed in

(Muthusamy Anantha Kumar) In the typical IT department, an un-avoidable task is to monitor the disk space on all drives on certain servers. In addition, the methods presented here will help in monitoring the growth of files. In this article, I am going to discuss three different ways to monitor disk

(Marcin Policht) If you have been following our series of articles discussing SQL Server DTS technology, you probably have noticed frequent references to ActiveX-based scripting. While scripting is not very popular among database administrators, its potentials are worth exploring, especially sin

(Dinesh Asanka) What ever the system that we are taking about, whether it is an ERP system or CRM tool or any database system auditing has become essential part of that system.. Auditing will allow you to: –Detect the misuse and prevent it being happened again. –Take legal actions against t

(Darren Green) You can use a parent or master package to control the execution of one or more child packages. This is often used in a looping scenario, or when there are a number of individual packages that make up a process. This can be achieved very simply in SQL Server 2000 by using the Execu

(Itzik Ben-Gan) When you write a multitable join that uses inner joins exclusively (or for that matter, only cross joins or only full outer joins), the table order you specify in the FROM clause doesn’t affect the query result. However, when you’re using left or right outer joins, if you revise the

(William Pearson) In this lesson, we will focus our attention on a function that behaves in a manner that is dramatically different from the INTERSECT() function. Instead of returning the common members of two sets, EXCEPT() returns the difference between two sets. Duplicate handling is managed thro

Backing up and restoring databases is part of every administrator’s job. While performing backups, a number of methods can be used to save time. If a database needs to be moved from one server to another, a backup on one server and a restore on another server is a great method. Some projects require