(Kasper de Jonge) Having played with Data mining in combination with PowerPivot in a previous blog post, i wanted to do data mining at the company i’m currently consulting at, they use Excel 2007 in combination with SSAS. In excel 2007 we do not have the power of the flattened pivot table. So i had

(gstolarov) This article touches on couple of issues related to geo-coding, in particular: –Converting ESRI shape file to XML –Parsing address –Geo-coding address

(Michael Coles) Ask about nearly any kind of SQL-based date calculation in the newsgroups, and you’ll likely get responses that include use of an auxiliary calendar table. It’s a really good idea, and something I highly recommend to anyone who has to do date-based calculations on the server. For t

(chrissk) We recently need to find all the difference in data between 2 SQL Servers each with 300 SQL replicated tables. To find the differences, we were planning on using the TableDiff utility included with SQL 2005 which is a command line tool designed to provide TSQL needed to manually sync two t

(Tim Cullen) The company I work for has migrated to SQL Server 2008 and we’re ready to start planning for the use of geospatial data. One of the applications we want to use geospatial data in will assist order fulfillers in efficiently picking stock for orders. Our warehouse is fairly large, which g

(John Charles Olamendy) The master, msdb and model databases are the corner stone of a SQL Server instance. A SQL Server instance does not work in an appropriate way if one of these databases is corrupt. Therefore, it’s very important to have backup of these databases in order to be ready to recover

(Matteo Lorini) Suppose that my SELECT statement returns some corrupted data or some values are not stored correctly; for example, a varchar field that contains some Unicode characters. It would be nice if we could use the DBCC PAGE command to see exactly what it is stored at the page level, however

(Kevin Beaver) SQL injection is a security exploit in which an attacker injects SQL parameters into a Web form, allowing he or she to send database queries and ultimately gain access. SQL injection is not a direct database problem but rather an application issue that indirectly affects your database

(Jonathan Kehayias) This post is prompted by feedback I received regarding some comments I made recently on Twitter regarding the regular usage of DBCC SHRINKDATABASE against SQL Server databases. I recently explained multiple times at work that using SHRINKDATABASE against a production database wa

(Paul S. Randal) A while ago I blogged about disk partition alignment, and how the default alignment of 31.5Kb on Windows Server 2003 can lead to enormous I/O performance problems (see Are your disk partition offsets, RAID stripe sizes, and NTFS allocation units set correctly?). We’ve been on-site w