Gregory Larsen

If your application has fields where users key in long free form text strings, then you probably have been storing the data entered in a text column within SQL Server. Storing data in text columns was your only option in SQL Server 2000 for any field that might exceed 8000 bytes worth of data. Working, […]

One of the tasks a DBA must consider is developing a backup strategy for their databases. A key piece of this strategy is to ensure that a complete set of the most recent database backups are available should there be a hardware failure. This article will discuss a method of how to use ALERTs, a […]

How many SQL Server instances are you running? Do you ever have customers calling you stating that their application is not working, then when you research the problem you find that the instance that supports their application is unavailable? Have you ever had someone mistakenly shutdown the SQL Agent service and forget to restart it, […]

With the introduction of SQL Server 2005 T-SQL was expanded to include new functionality. The “APPLY” operation was one of the new T-SQL enhancements. This article will discuss the APPLY operator and provide a few examples of how it can be used. What is the APPLY Operator? The APPLY operator allows T-SQL to invoke a […]

Microsoft introduced dynamic management views (DMV) and functions (DMF) with SQL Server 2005. So what are DMV’s and DMF’s? How do you use these dynamic management objects? DMVs and DMFs are a mechanism to allow you to look at the internal workings of SQL Server using TSQL. They allow you an easy method for monitoring […]

How much of your time is spent dealing with disk space management issues on your SQL Server machine? What methods do you use to identify which SQL Server databases contain lots of unused space? Do you have the space usage statistics necessary to allow you to accurately forecast the growth rate of your SQL Server […]

Have you started looking at what issues you might have migrating your existing applications to SQL Server 2005? If not then maybe as a first step, you should consider looking into what the SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Advisor can do for you. This article will discuss what the Upgrade Advisor is and how to use […]

Server 2005 now supports a more programmable error trapping convention in T-SQL code. This error handling is known as the TRY/CATCH block. The TRY/CATCH block allows T-SQL to handling errors like other programming languages, such as Microsoft Visual C# and C++. In addition to the TRY/CATCH block, Microsoft has expanded the set of available system […]

Every DBA needs a few tricks up his/her sleeves to help them better manage their SQL Server 2000 environment. In this article I will explore a couple of such tricks. I will first explore how to cycle the SQL Server error log, and why you might want to do this. Secondly I will discuss backup […]

If you need to make small changes to an existing database object, then you will need to do some impact assessment to determine what SQL Server Objects will be affected by your small change. So how do you identify those database objects that will be affected by a scheme change? Is there a simple way […]

SQL Server 2005 provides some new command line utilities. One such utility is “sqlcmd”. The sqlcmd utility is used to run adhoc queries interactively from a command prompt window, or can be used to execute a script containing T-SQL statements. The sqlcmd utility is a great improvement over osql and isql of older releases of […]