Deadlocking occurs when two user processes have locks on separate objects and each process is trying to acquire a lock on the object that the other process has. When this happens, SQL Server ends the deadlock by automatically choosing one and aborting the process, allowing the other process to conti

(Muthusamy Anantha Kumar) Data Base Administrators are often exposed to a situation where they want to query a table, check on the status of a server, check an error log or run a DBCC command on a SQL Server box when they do not have access to the box directly. This often happens when they are off s

(Joe Chang) Many of us are interested in the features and changes in Yukon. A quick look shows some changes in the execution plan cost formulas for Yukon Beta 1. It is quite likely that more changes will be made between beta 1 and the final release. Most of the cost formulas appear not to have ch

This chapter describes functions and expressions that can be used in Microsoft SQL Server SQL statements and Transact SQL programs.

(Alexander Chigrik) Extended stored procedure is a dynamic link library that run directly in the address space of SQL Server and is programmed using the SQL Server Open Data Services API. You can write your own extended stored procedure in a programming language such as C. You can run extended store

(Nigel Rivett) You have a production table and wish to add or change a column. How do you do it? One way is to create a new table with the new structure, copy all the data across, delete the old table, rename the new table, apply constraint, foreign keys etc. A much simpler way is to use alte

(Baya Pavliashvili) In the previous article in this series, I introduced you to user-defined functions (UDFs), which are excellent tools for certain programming tasks. This article discusses the advantages and limitations that are associated with UDFs, and shows you the coding tasks that qualify as

(Marcin Policht) As we indicated in our previous article, we are going to continue discussing various ways of utilizing global variables in DTS Designer tasks. In particular, we will look into their role in exchanging data between packages, using features built into the Execute Package task. As part

(Jeffrey P. McManus and Jack Goldstein) The database project is a special type of Visual Studio.NET project. Its purpose is to create and manage SQL database scripts. If you’re developing database applications with Visual Studio.NET, you will want to know about the tools available for making your wo

(Alexander Chigrik) A stored procedure is a precompiled collection of Transact-SQL statements stored under a name and processed as a unit that you can call from within another Transact-SQL statement or from the client applications. SQL Server ships with a number of stored procedures, which can be