Article which explains the basics of SQL Server startup parameters.

by Randy Dyess – Learn the basics of how to turn queries and stored procedures.

By Michael Otey – Yukon will be here before you know it. And nothing would put you in a better position to hit the ground running with the upcoming SQL Server release than to start evaluating when and where to use the new CLR languages in your environment.

by Scott Bekker – SQL Server consolidated its No. 1 position in the 2002 worldwide OLAP market, where Microsoft’s presence continues to drive down the value of the average sale. But even so, Redmond is not enjoying the kind of market dominance it has achieved in other markets, according to prelimina

By Dennis Fisher – As hackers continue to find ways around edge-of-network security walls, several companies are readying software and appliances that drive protection deeper—to database files.

This article demonstrates how to automate Microsoft Word 2000 from client-side script to perform a mail merge for labels. Word 2000 does not have a direct method for using XML data as the data source for a mail merge. The sample illustrates Active Server Pages (ASP) code that streams an XML recordse

by Joe Celko – If you hang around the database developer newsgroups, you’ll find rookie programmers who write their code with proprietary features of whatever SQL product they have. They argue that they’ll never have to port this code, so why bother to write standard SQL when you can gain some advan

When the query optimizer in SQL Server 7.0 examines the distribution statistics of a composite index, does it take into account the statistics for each column in the index or just the statistics in the first column (assuming that this table has only index statistics, not column statistics)? If the o

by Erland Sommarskog – Use with care: about dynamic SQL in stored procedures in MS SQL Server, why use stored procedures at all, the conflicts between the virtues of stored procedures and the effects of dynamic SQL, and more.

By Itzik Ben-Gan – Here are some tips about using partitioned views, including how to circumvent the limitation on inserting data into tables through a partitioned view, and problems with using constants in the partitioning criteria.