(Jiqin Ma) Recently I needed to find a method to import one cell of an Excel sheet into SQL Server 2005 using a scheduled job on a 64 bit clustered environment. For example, I have a monthly sales report listing sales per product category, such as Books, Magazines, DVDs, etc. I only want to import t

(Buck Woody) This is the third article in a series of a formal process you can follow to migrate data stored in “departmental data stores” (such as Excel, text files, XML documents and so on) into a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) like SQL Server. The first article in this series is he

(Jonathan Kehayias) In my last blog post I mentioned that I have been writing a lot of Powershell to simplify auditing and maintaining all of the servers I manage at my job. One of the items that I do on all of my servers is setup the SQL Server ErrorLog to rollover nightly so that if I need to loo

(Peter Scharlock) SQL Server 2008 R2 added a much requested feature: Unicode compression. It addresses the need to compress Unicode strings. It is implemented as part of ROW compression, which was added in SQL 2008. That is; if ROW compression (on SQL 2008 R2) is enabled on a table that contains NCH

(Dennis Wallentin) This is the second blog post about populating a TreeView control. In the first blog post, Populate TreeView Control with Tables and Columns from MS Access Database, I used a MS Access database to populate a TreeView with its tables and related columns. In this blog post I will in

(Pinalkumar Dave) The performance of SQL Server is primarily decided by the disk I/O efficiency. Improving I/O definitely improves the performance. SQL Server 2008 introduced Data and Backup compression features to improve the disk I/O. Here, I will explain Data compression.

(chrissk) When troubleshooting Transactional Replication performance break down the flow of data into 4 simultaneous conversation. Examine performance of each conversation. This will help verify where the bottleneck investigation should begin.

(Thomas LaRock) SQL 2008 introduced Policy Based Management (PBM), allowing for database administrators to have greater control over their environment through the use of policies. SQL 2008 comes with over fifty (50) policies, but none are installed by default. You need to import these policies manua

There have been quite a few enhancements in SSRS in R2. Some of the ones that we have played with so far are: –Report Builder 3.0: Right now, it is not bundled with the CTP. You need to download it separately from here. –Support for the Map and Spatial Data –AJAX Report Viewer –RDL en

(Eric Johnson) SQL Server 2008 shipped with several enhancements to the T-SQL language. In a recent blog, we looked at the new MERGE syntax; today we are going to look at the new EXCEPT and INTERSECT syntax. Both of these operators allow you to compare results of two queries. Using EXCEPT, you can f