(Anurag Sharma) In many cases customer often have large databases published and creating a snapshot of such large database is always a pain. And, even when published databases are of manageable size, a slow or unreliable network link can further complicate the issue.

(Gethyn Ellis) For my next series of blog posts I intend to document and write about SQL Server replication. This is a pretty large topic and I make no claims to an expert in replication but over the last couple years I have been working with replication more and more and I think it is time I wrote

(Mike Chapple) Microsoft provides the SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Advisor (SSUA) to help you detect upgrade issues before they occur. This tool examines your SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 databases and checks for any potential conflicts.

The How to: Create an External Content Type Based on a SQL Server Table topic explains the basic way to work with Business Connectivity Services to show external data from a SQL Server database.

(Siddharth Mehta) In the course of any database development project, searching for database objects is something you will probably do. It can be any kind of search which is done using some text as the search mechanism. Some of the examples of search that a developer / DBA may make within a database

(Robert Sheldon) String functions in T-SQL let you work with character values such as char, nchar, varchar and nvarchar. For instance, you can use string functions to remove trailing spaces, extract part of a value, or convert numerical data to character data. String functions add flexibility to you

(Chintak Chhapia) Before we directly jump to the topic, I would like to give a basic introduction of SELECT..INTO statement.

(Anu Chawla) Your data is critical to your business. You need to be able to reliably back up your data„Ÿand then easily restore it if there is some sort of failure. This is still true in an environment that is running TEMENOS T24.

(Adam Machanic) The sys.dm_exec_query_stats view is one of my favorite DMVs. It has replaced a large chunk of what I used to use SQL Trace for–pulling metrics about what queries are running and how often–and it makes this kind of data collection painless and automatic. What’s not to love? But use

(Michael M. David) Learn how hierarchical data processing can be optimally driven automatically by its hierarchical structure semantics. When applied to SQL hierarchical data processing, this structured semantics offers optimization beyond current relational processing. In addition, this hierarchica