Get well soon Ken!

Really interesting question. I had to create something like this recently (used SFTP file transfer between untrusted domains) but, lucky for me, I could use SQL auth 🙂 .

Snapshots won't...

This series is great, but isn't the phrase "months of laborious work" indicative of the notion it might be more effective to buy a monitoring tool than to write one?...

This, like many articles, seems written by a person who hasn't read much of the existing thought on the topic, and is therefore blindly bumping into old issues that have...

Thanks for trying it out, Phil. I suspect that this comparison depends greatly on what type of cursor is involved, and the locking and concurrency implications (for example, is the...

I also read that article and can't find it anymore :-).

The important thing, I think, is that there are underlying REASONS why cursors perform badly (or well) in different circumstances....

Interesting, but please all do not forget that this is what PERMISSIONS are for in SQL Server. I find it's best to use a thing according to its intended purpose...

Eric Wilson - I could not have said it better. Well put.

This is important information to have in one's toolkit, only for the times when you have to undo it...

Mr Stover -

"And for those people who think 100 columns are better than one - did you people just graduate from vo-tech? Sure, storage and hardware may be cheap but...

While academically interesting, using a bitmask in this fashion is TO BE AVOIDED. It's like a deliberate obfuscation of the data, coupled with a deliberate undermining of the relational features...

"I'm still not sure what license is required for the o/s where say the server is a pure server in isolation - e.g. clients access web server to sql server...

I guess that is key: this is a web application, not typical office workers using a suite of network services. Being a web application, the notion of platform at the...

Like spam, this seems to be an arms race -- ads finding new ways to demand attention, and readers finding new ways to stop them.

For my part, I don't mind...

Valid point. Is this then a valid comparison for a dual proc/ dual core box with 8 GB RAM?:

Oracle 10g Release 2 Standard Edition

$15,000 * 4 = $60,000

Red Hat Enterprise...

Do these lads want to become experts? Or casual users?

If experts, then I like Celko's books for overview/standards/theory (SQL for Smarties is great) and Itsik Ben-Gan's two Inside SQL Server...