Gregory Larsen

Have you ever wondered if you could start the execution of a stored procedure (SP) asynchronously from some T-SQL code? What I mean is starting the SP in the background and continuing on with the next line of code in your T-SQL script without waiting for the execution of the SP to complete. If so, […]

As a DBA, you will need to perform a number of different tasks to keep your databases and servers up and running. One of those DBA tasks you will need to perform is disk space capacity planning. You need to make sure there is enough disk space, so when one of your databases needs to […]

When a column in a row contains a NULL what does this mean? So what is a NULL? Is a NULL value a zero, space, or something else? From a SQL Server perspective a NULL is not a value, it only means that a value was not provided when the row was created. Special considerations […]

Have you every needed to get the information returned from a stored procedure (SP) into a SQL Server table? Or have you wondered how you might get the contents of an operating system (OS) file into a SQL Server table? How about placing the output of some Windows executable into a SQL Server table so […]

If you have yet to find out about the little extended stored procedure gem known as “xp_cmdshell”, then this article is for you. In this article, I will cover what “xp_cmdshell” is and different things you can use it for. If you already know something about “xp_cmdshell” then you might still want to browse this […]

How many applications do you have that capture a status field for one reason or another? Do these status fields support only a single status value at a time? Or does the single status field support multiple different statuses being associated with a given record at the same time? This article will discuss how to […]

How many times have you had problems sending SQL MAIL or SQL Agent Mail from SQL Server because the Exchange server was taken down or not working? Have you ever tried to connect up SQL Mail and/or SQL Agent mail to Exchange through a firewall or across domains, only to find out that you cannot […]

Are you a Database Administrator that has a desire to work remotely but don’t have access to your databases while you are out of your office? Would you consider using a web interface to manage your SQL Server databases and Logins? If so, then you might want to consider checking out Microsoft’s tool that will […]

I don’t know if you are like me but I like to have document and coding examples to help me manage applications and Microsoft SQL Server. I am not sure what I would do without good documentation and a few code examples to help me maintain my SQL Server environment. Microsoft has done a great […]

This is the second article in a series discussing benchmarking T-SQL query performance. The first article in this series discussed different methods of capturing the elapsed time of a T-SQL batch, pieces of a batch, or a single T-SQL statement. This article will discuss how to determine the amount of CPU and I/O used when […]

How many times have you had more than one way to do something and wanted to determine which method was faster and/or which one used more resources? I am going to guess that most developers have run across this dilemma more than once. So how do you decide with method is faster–or which method requires […]

The CASE function is a very useful T-SQL function. With this function you can replace a column value with a different value based on the original column value. An example of where this function might come in handy is where you have a table that contains a column named SexCode, where 0 stands for female, […]