(Larry Leonard) The “best practices” concept is truly a great thing, especially when appied to T-SQL code. But does your best practices process amount to (a) carefully writing down the things you know you should do, and then (b) not having time to do them? If so, my next few posts will describe an e

(Simon Sabin) The XML Source in SSIS is great if you have a 1 to 1 mapping between entity and table. You can do more complex mapping but it becomes very messy and won’t perform. What other options do you have?

(Pinalkumar Dave) This is very common concept that truncate can not be rolled back. I always hear conversation between developer if truncate can be rolled back or not.

(Arshad Ali) SQL Server stores meta data about its configuration options, objects, data type, constraints, etc. in system tables, which cannot be directly queried in SQL Server 2005 and 2008. To access this meta data, SQL Server offers several options. The option I have selected in this tip is the

(Paul S. Randal) Way back in the mists of time, at the end of the last century, I wrote DBCC SHOWCONTIG for SQL Server 2000, to complement my new invention DBCC INDEXDEFRAG.

(Amit Chaudhary) The key new features of SQL Server 2008 R2 relate to the management of organizations’ master data (Master Data Services – MDS ), administration of multiple servers (SQL Server Utility), and processing large amounts of data (PowerPivot for Excel, formerly known as Project Gemini).

(Chris Skorlinski) We worked with a customer the other day who had 2 SSIS packages running queries against SQL Server database. One SSIS package executed twice as fast on one SQL Server as it did on another SQL Server. While troubleshooting, we wanted to see if the longer run time was a SQL engine

(Serdar Yegulalp) Deep in the bowels of the invaluable SQLServerPedia site there are countless custom functions that can be used in most any context. I recently dug up a slew of string manipulation functions. While these might normally be used after data has been returned from a query, they are also

Consider the following scenario: –You use an OLEDB provider that is implemented as a mixed mode DLL (that is, a DLL that contain both managed and native code) –You configure a linked server to this provider from your SQL Server instance(either SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008). –You conf

(Kalen Delaney) I thought I had said almost all that could be said about nonclustered index keys in a post made almost exactly two years ago, on March 16, 2008. But there’s more.