Gregory Larsen

How can you monitor changes to your Database Schema? Why would you want to track changes to your database structure? You might want to track changes to your database data definitions for a number of different reasons. With the introduction of SQL Server 2005, Microsoft now allows you to write Data Definition Language (DDL) triggers […]

Having indexes on your tables provides a method to improve performance of your T-SQL queries. However, indexes also increase the amount of work SQL Server needs to perform when inserting, updating, or deleting rows. As time passes, index performance can slow down as indexes become fragmented. As a DBA, you need to understand how your […]

Having a consistent SQL Server environment is important. Knowing that all your SQL Server machines are setup the same helps to minimizing confusion when managing multiple machines. If you have lots of machines, it is absolutely imperative that all your SQL Server setups be the same. In order to make sure all of your SQL […]

With SQL Server 2005 comes a new mail sub-system, called Database Mail. Database Mail is a great improvement over SQL Mail that came with earlier versions of SQL Server. Now you are able to set up multiple accounts and profiles to support your different application email needs. This article will discuss setting up and managing […]

With SQL Server 2005, Microsoft introduced a number of new features. These new features make it easier for a DBA or SQL Server developer to code against and to maintain SQL Server databases. In this article I will discuss the new ranking functions provided with SQL Server 2005. These new functions make it much easier […]

When working with data in SQL Server you might run across different needs to change the case of the data. For instance, you might want to convert all the characters in a varchar column to upper case, lower case, or change only the first character of a column value to upper case. In addition, you […]

My last article related to date calculations, which was written a few years ago, has generated a number of questions from readers. More than one reader has asked me if I knew how to calculate a certain day of the week based on the current date. Therefore, I have decided to write another article that […]

Have you ever wanted to return the last 100 rows of a given set of records? What about the second set of 100 records? Or possibly, you have wanted to return the first so many billing records for each billing month. This article will discuss how to use the TOP clause to help solve those […]

In this article I’m going to deviate from my normal “How To” type of articles to discuss what to consider when you restore a database. I will discuss the kinds of things each DBA should go through as they are requested to perform a database restore. The things that need to be considered fall into […]

In the old days, it was common practice to have to stop, and restart SQL Server frequently for one reason or another. However, lately with SQL Server 2000 and Windows 2000 we can run for months with never having to stop and restart the SQL Server services, or rebooting our machines. Occasionally we do run […]

When dealing with data you run into all kinds of different situations. For each different occurrence you might need to have a different technique to produce the results you require. Last month I discussed a couple of different comma separated data situations. This month I will deal with a couple of additional circumstances that you […]

When dealing with data you come across many different situations. In this article I will discuss how to deal with a few situations that involve working with comma separated data. Comma separated data can come in many forms. It can be input, a text string stored in a column, or a number of other situations. […]