Additional Articles


External Article

Survival tips for PowerPoint

there are occasions in all of our working lives when sitting through a PowerPoint presentation is inevitable. Fortunately, there are techniques for feigning interest, many of which have developed over hundreds of years. All you need is a handful of like-minded colleagues with a sporting attitude

2006-02-03

2,581 reads

External Article

Counting Parents and Children with Count Distinct

The aggregate functions in SQL Server (min, max, sum, count, average, etc.) are great tools for reporting and business analysis. But sometimes, you need to tweak them just a little bit to get exactly the results you need. For example, if your manager came to you and asked for a report on how many sales have been made to your clients and how large they were, would you know how to get the data you need efficiently? Mark ran into something like this recently and here's the approach he took to solve the problem.

2006-01-25

3,507 reads

Technical Article

SQL Server 2005 DB Snapshot: Imperfect Yet Useful?

Database Snapshot (DB Snapshot for short) is a new tool offered by SQL Server 2005. Database snapshots can be used to protect against user errors, by creating a "snapshot" of your data that you can refer to later if you need to recover data or database objects that were accidentally (or even intentionally) updated or dropped. While the feature is quite useful, it doesn’t provide a 100% guarantee against user errors.

2006-01-24

2,078 reads

Technical Article

Encrypting Without Secrets

Do you have a Web site or other system that deals in secrets of any sort? It seems like every time I give a security talk, people ask how to deal with the sticky problem of storing secrets. Connection strings with passwords are an obvious problem. You're better off simply using integrated security to get rid of those secrets, at least with SQL Server™, or an Oracle database. But what about credit card numbers and other financial or personal information? Can encryption help?

2006-01-23

2,476 reads

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Not Just an Upgrade

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Question of the Day

Restoring On Top I

I am doing development work on a database and want to keep a backup so I can reset my database. I make some changes and want to restore over top of my changes. When I run this code, what happens?

USE Master
BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak'
GO

USE DNRTest
GO
CREATE TABLE MyTest(myid INT)
GO
USE master
RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACE

See possible answers