1) Select fewer columns, and use a well tuned covering index

2) Select fewer rows, and use a well tuned (covering) index

3) Make sure that table has a clustered index, and...

Ramji29 (8/17/2010)

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See this all depends on the value of the data... as if data is critical then you can even have 2-4 weeks of backups on your drives itself (which...

I try to keep T-logs going back two full database backups; just in case the most recent full backup file gets corrupted/lost/overwritten/whatever/the tape degrades/whatever.

If you really only have 5 disks, you have only 3 major choices:

5 disk RAID5

3 disk RAID5 + 2 disk RAID1

2 disk RAID1 + 2 disk RAID1 + hot spare

And...

In memento of the "as compact as possible", change DayID to smalldatetime and, if necessary, start at -32768 (there are exactly 65,536 days available to the SMALLDATETIME data type).

DayNum should...

There is only one good way to see if encryption is being used; and that is to see if encryption is being used! Not if it is set up,...

SQL Jobs, at least in 2000, and very likely in 2005/8, can easily fail or hang without retry or notification.

SQL Jobs are a very useful way of automating work, but...

For anyone that says Unicode, I ask, which one?

UTF-8

UTF-16 (BE by default)

UTF-16BE

UTF-16LE

UTF-32 (BE by default)

UTF-32BE

UTF-32LE

Or, perhaps, late 90's (very archaic) implementations like UCS-2 (used in SQL...

First defense against a data breach: Don't have the data in the first place.

This would be trivial if, for the past years, companies had only kept data absolutely necessary to...

Steve Jones - Editor (8/6/2010)

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Auditing sysadmins is hard. Especially since the sysadmin has to set things up!

SQL 2008 has good auditing capabilities, and what you need to do is write...

What's the bottleneck on your particular system? If your accounting methods leave you with a hardware budget without a software license budget, you can try throwing hardware at it.

If...

Charles Kincaid (8/3/2010)

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Great article. If you have to parse strings in SQL then having the tally table is great.

I would have appraoched the problem with a different tool set.

SELECT...

The only way to truly tell if you can do a point in time restore, is to actually do a point in time restore (preferably to some other server), with...

philcart (8/3/2010)

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As previously stated, the cost of adding and updating the indexes is actually a lot smaller than it's made out to be. This is the same sort of thing...

philcart (7/30/2010)

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@wbrianwhite & @Nadrek

The cost of adding and updating the indexes is actually a lot smaller than it's made out to be. Only under extreme change (meaning insert/update/delete)...