Trace-scrubbing Tools

Andrew Zanevsky shares his trace-scrubbing procedures that make it easy for you to handle large trace files and aggregate transactions by type–even when captured T-SQL code has variations.

SQL Server Profiler is a veritable treasure trove when it comes to helping DBAs optimize their T-SQL code. But, the surfeit of riches (I'm reminded of the Arabian Nights tale of Aladdin) can be overwhelming. I recently had one of those "sinking" feelings when I first tried to make sense of the enormous amount of data collected by traces on a client's servers. At this particular client, the online transactions processing system executes more than 4 million database transactions per hour. That means that even a 30-minute trace that captures "SQL Batch Completed" events results in a table with 2 million rows. Of course, it's simply impractical to process so many records without some automation, and even selecting the longest or most expensive transactions doesn't necessarily help in identifying bottlenecks. After all, short transactions can be the culprits of poor performance when executed thousands of times per minute.

Internal SQL Server Diagnostics Tools, Part 1: PSSDiag

Ken Henderson explains how to use PSSDiag, a diagnostics collection tool for SQL Server. PSSDiag is one of several Microsoft Product Support Services tools recently released to the Web that are now available for personal use. (26 printed pages)

Transactional replication performance tuning and optimization

Transactional replication is a type of replication provided by SQL Server 2000 that allows data modifications to be propagated incrementally between servers in a distributed environment.

A list of the bugs that are fixed in SQL Server 2000 SP 4 Beta

This article contains information about the bugs that are fixed by Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 Beta. (SP4).

Securing Your Microsoft SQL Server Databases in an Enterprise Environm

If you are running Microsoft SQL Server databases to support critical enterprise applications, you are part of a growing trend.

Manipulating Microsoft SQL Server Using SQL Injection

Focuses on advanced techniques that can be used in an attack on an application utilizing Microsoft SQL Server as a backend. These techniques demonstrate how an attacker could use a SQL Injection vulnerability to retrieve the database content from behind a firewall and penetrate the internal network. Also provided are recommendations on how to prevent such attacks.

Common QA for deploying SQL Server in a SAN Environment

Detailed question/answer paper on deploying SQL Server in a Storage Area Network (SAN) Environment.

Get all from Table A that isn't in Table B

A common requirement when building a data warehouse is to be able to get all rows from a staging table where the business key is not in the dimension table. For example, I may want to get all rows from my STG_DATE table where the DateID is not in DIM_DATE.DateID.

SQL Server Hardware Performance Checklist

We take a look at each of the major components of a SQL Server's hardware, and examine what can be done to help maximize the performance of your hardware.

SQL Server: Compare Query Results - Part I

In the Database administration world, it is often necessary to run a query on the production box and then run the same query on the QA or UAT box and compare the results. In this article, I would like to introduce a method that takes advantage of an MS-DOS batch file and SQL Server utility, BCP.exe, to compare the query results executed on two different servers.