Reporting Strictly for Developers: Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Serv

With the release of SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft finally makes a commitment to developer-centric reporting. They've integrated the design-time environment integration with Visual Studio and enabled report delivery through Web browsers, PDFs, Excel, and XML. Learn how to make this tool work for you.

Generate SQL Automatically Without Compromising Quality

Most database developers dread including such navigation features as paginated reports, hierarchical navigation, filtering, and full-text search because the amount of time they take to develop is not proportional to the utility or interest they create. In addition, connecting individual pages and controls to the database is mind-numbing work. Since writing SQL is non-trivial in any circumstance, it typically requires a specialist DBA's involvement.
..... As Web-based applications proliferate to bring more functionality directly to end-users, writing every SQL statement for every web-based application in your shop is likely to become a never-ending Sisyphean task for your DBA.

Using the Table Data Type in SQL Server 2000

Performing routine database maintenance such as reindexing is important for keeping your databases running at peak performance. When you use INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements to modify table data, indexes can become fragmented. Index fragmentation can happen when the logical sequence of pages is disrupted or when an index page contains less than its maximum amount of data, creating a gap in the data page or index. As indexes become fragmented, you get inefficient data reads when accessing tables and slower database performance.

SQL Building Blocks and Server Settings

This chapter covers the building blocks available to the database designer and database user to create and modify database objects and data. The SQL Data Types will be covered along with data representation as literals (constants) and expressions.

SQL Server 2005 Security - Part 3 Encryption

After discussing authentication and authorization behavior of SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 in the previous two articles of this series, it is time to look into other security-related changes. In particular, we will focus on the freshly introduced native database encryption capabilities. While some encryption functionality existed in the previous versions (e.g. involving column encryption APIs within User Defined Functions or PWDENCRYPT password one-way hash function), it was relatively limited and rarely used. SQL Server 2005 provides significant improvements in this area.

COM Without Registration

When .NET first appeared it wasn't unusual to hear the question "Is COM dead?" In fact COM seems to be alive and well, and in this article I'll look at the way that Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 allow you to use COM in a side-by-side way without installing the usual registration entries – you won't need to use the Windows Registry to use side-by-side COM components.

SQL Server 2005 Security - Part 2 Authorization

Following the discussion of new or enhanced authentication-related functionality in SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 in our previous article, we are shifting our focus to authorization features, which determine the level of access rights once the user's logon process is successfully completed. Among topics that will be covered here, are separation of user and schema, modifiable context of module execution, increased permission granularity, and improved catalog security.

Changing XML Schema attached in SQL Server 2005

XML has become an first class datatype in SQL Server 2005 . You can check my previous articles for an idea of XML features introduced. In this article we will take a look at how we can alter a XML Schema attached to an Typed XML data. XML's can be caegorized into two categories, typed and un-typed. Any XML that conforms to an XML schema is called as typed. And on the contrary plain XML strings are called as un-typed.

Replicating Identity columns in SQL Server - Customizing replication

When transactional replication is used for high availability purposes, such as if you want the applications to access the replicated server when the primary database server fails, one of the hurdles SQL Server database administrators face when configuring replication is tables with identity columns.

In this article, I am going to discuss how to customize the replication in order to make the subscription database look identical to the publishing database, so that when there is a failure in the primary server, it is simple to fail over to the subscription database.

Data Mining Reloaded

The two main functions of data mining are classification and prediction (or forecasting). Data mining helps you make sense of those countless gigabytes of raw data stored in databases by finding important patterns and rules present in the data or derived from it. Analysts then use this knowledge to make predictions and recommendations about new or future data. The main business applications of data mining are learning who your customers are and what they need, understanding where the sales are coming from and what factors affect them, fashioning marketing strategies, and predicting future business indicators.