Gregory Larsen

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could change DTS package properties at runtime? If you could then you could have a generic package that processed different files, loaded different database tables and/or connected to different servers, plus a slew of other things. In this article, I will be discussing how to use the dynamic property […]

Have you ever had a need to run a query or a process as soon as SQL Server starts? Or run some set of tasks when SQL Server Agent Starts? Possibly you want to run a cleanup routine, a copy process or have some task started each time SQL server or SQL Agent is started. […]

Every once in a while, an event might happen that corrupts a database. We have all made a stupid mistake at least once that has trashed a database. When this happens what do you do? If you do not have a database backup, then you had better own up to the problem you caused and […]

There are a number of wizards in SQL Server 2000. One of these wizards is known as the index tuning wizard. The index tuning wizard is used for exactly what it sounds like; it is used for tuning indexes. This article will introduce you to the index tuning wizard and will explain how you can […]

There are many different kinds of joins, like INNER JOIN, LEFT OUTER JOIN, RIGHT OUTER JOIN, and FULL OUTER JOIN. The first three of these different join types are implemented in Access, but FULL OUTER JOIN is not. If you need to perform a FULL OUTER JOIN in Access, are you “up a creek, without […]

Every DBA needs to transfer data between tables. This is the kind of task that comes up all the time. Not only do DBAs need to know how to transfer data between two tables on the same server, but they will also need to know how to do it from one server to another. This […]

In my article last month, I wrote about different methods you could use to identify the state of a SQL Server Agent job. One of the methods I discussed was using the undocumented extended stored procedure (XP) “xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs.” In this article, I will show you how to use the “xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs” XP to help identify long […]

How do you determine if a SQL Server Agent Job is running? Is there a way to automate the process of determining if a SQL Server Agent job is running? What automated approach is there to determine what step is being processed for a given SQL Server Agent job? Is there an easy way to […]

In last month’s article, I discussed what and how to use a subquery in a T-SQL statement. This month I will expand on this subject by discussing correlated subqueries. I will explain what a correlated subquery is, and show a number of different examples on how to use a subquery in a T-SQL statement. What […]

Sometimes the criteria for determining which set of records will be affected by a SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE and/or INSERT statement cannot be obtained by hard coding the selection criteria. Occasionally there is a need to use the results of a SELECT statement to help determine which records are returned or are affected by a T-SQL […]

In my first article in this series, I discussed how to store different statuses in a single integer column. In this article, I will expand on the topic of using integer columns for storing statuses and will discuss how to update the integer status column to change or remove any given status. Prior to getting […]

Have you ever needed to write some code that would process through all the tables in a database? What about running some code against each database on a SQL Server instance? If so, did you know there are a couple of different ways to accomplish this? Either you can create a cursor that contains all […]