(Derik Hammer) As promised from my last post, Relocating SQL Server System Databases without Access to the Instance, today I will be blogging about ‘unattended’ or ‘silent’ installations of SQL Server. I will be discussing the concept and uses of the unattended installation and then I will provide d

(Thomas LaRock) Last weekend Karen Lopez (blog | @datachick) and I did a session together at SQL Saturday #159 in Kansas City titled Database Design Throwdown: The Trailer.

(Jugal Shah) In some cases there may be a need to make a SQL Server table read only. There are several different options for doing this and in this tip we cover various ways that you can make a table read only in a SQL Server database.

(Roman Rehak) While the list of new features in SQL Server 2012 isn’t as long as it was in previous versions, there is still much to be excited about. New features include better visualization and richer reports, data alerting capability and new export options. This article will give you an overview

(Valentino Vranken) The other day I needed a counter in my SSIS Control Flow. Using the Foreach Loop container I was looping over a bunch of files and needed to count the number of files that got imported successfully. The counter had to comply with the following requirements:

(Dave Ballantyne) Although, generally speaking, source control is the truth, a database doesn’t quite conform to the ideal because the target schema can, for valid reasons, contain other conflicting truths that can’t easily be captured in source control.

(Grant Fritchey) If you’re moving to a fully-fledged SQL database as part of Azure you may never even touch SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Instead you may do all the management of your SQL database through the Management Portal. You can actually do everything you need to through this tool.

(Pinal Dave) Here is the very interesting error I received from a reader. He has very interesting question. He attempted to use BIT filed in the SUM aggregation function and he got following error. He went ahead with various different datatype (i.e. INT, TINYINT etc) and he was able to do the SUM bu

(Rajendra Gupta) SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical functions PERCENT_RANK and CUME_DIST. In this tip we will explore these functions and how to use them.

(Colleen Morrow) Ok so, now that we’ve covered the basics of creating a SQL Audit and viewing the output, let’s put the pieces together to form a complete solution. As with any implementation, the key to success lies in careful planning. Before we take off running, we need to take a moment and figur