Maybe that differential backup on sunday starts before the full backup is finished. I guess you take full backups once a week. Otherwise the differentials will grow steadily and finally...

Security can't be added-on, it must be baked-in.

Let's take a look at the data access protocol for tomorrows applications: OData. It was originally designed to allow easy access to open...

First, thanks for the nice responses to my reply.

Many browser based applications use a single proxy account to query the database, so this account must have enough rights to perform...

Í am both a developer of ASP.NET MVC solutions and a professional MSSQL DBA. I think it is not so much about stored procedures being better or worse, it is...

As a DBA the first thing that pops into my mind is large scale BI processing and data mining. This will put quite some pressure on the challenge of moving...

Banking is a good example. However, transactional consistency is not about deposits and withdraws, but about transfers. If you transfer money from your account to another account to pay a...

SQL builds on mathematical set theory. NoSQL has no theoretical basis. That is neither good nor bad, but it is a major difference. Transactional consistency is required by SQL to...

Isn't setting ROWCOUNT also a valid option to limit the number of rows affected by a DELETE statement? Or am I missing something here?

Nice article.

I have been called once by power users after they had started a batch with incorrect parameters, and another time when they started the batch accidentaly while they only...

Have I missed something? Can anyone tell me why RCS might be a solution, if it is not clear what the problem really is, and when it occurs? Are we...

When you know there's only zero or one result row:

SELECT MAX(name) FROM atable WHERE a = 1

But maybe that's too simple ...

Thanks for adding the link to the Dilbert site, it was indeed this comic! To ad just one little one-liner:

Wow, it works! But what did I do?

This phrase has become common along members of our DBA team after an infamous 'Dilbert', where a manager asks for some specific data. If the employee...

Notice the other limitations of SQL Express: this edition will only use 1 processor and 1 GB of server memory. Of course you can run multiple instances and spread your...

Sometimes even log files of databases using the simple recovery model can grow indefinitely, maybe caused by a hanging replication. It can drive you mad if you try to shrink...