With the release of Reporting Services, Microsoft has provided a truly enterprise-level reporting solution. Reporting Services provides support for the entire reporting life cycle including report authoring, report management, and report delivery
SQL Server includes autonumber of identity columns despite the fact that they are not SQL-92 compliant. There is quite a bit of debate over the use of them in your database, but if you do decide to use them, you should be aware of potential problems. New author Troy Ketsdever brings us a story about his identity crisis and how it was solved.
In this article, we will conclude our coverage of security related changes in SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 (although we will continue discussion of improvements in other functionality areas throughout the reminder of this series). The topics we will focus on here are code and module signing, modifications of SQL Server Agent and SQL Profiler operations, as well as monitoring and auditing changes.
SQL Server is an easy to use product in many ways, much better than the other major RDBMSs out there. However it's source control and ease of moving changes from development to production needs some work. Having a solid process is as important as good tools and new author Grant Fritchey brings us his proven method for moving changes through QA into production.
SQL Server doesn't have a Product aggregate function. A recent blog post by Karen Watterson pointed out that Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q89656: Simulating a PRODUCT() Aggregate Function discusses how to achieve the Product aggregate functionality using the POWER function. We e-mailed about it and she challenged me to create a Product aggregate in SQL Server 2005. I decided to accept the challenge.
We have described, so far, authorization based on a predefined fixed server (determining a set of SQL server-wide privileges) and database (applying to database objects and activities) roles. We have also discussed application roles, which makes the level of permissions independent of those assigned to a SQL Server login or a database user account. Now it is time to look into permissions from the point of view of database objects. There are two main factors that play a role in determining how access rights to them are evaluated - their ownership and custom permissions. We will discuss the first one of these topics in this article and will continue with the other one in the next installment of this series.
SQL Server does many things very well, but securing itself is not one of them. While securing your server requires some effort, there is an area that many people forget. Securing your backups! Brian Kelley, our resident security expert, brings some advice and ideas for ensuring your data will not be stolen.
I worked in a team recently that was failing to put Visual SourceSafe (VSS) labels on projects after they were checked in we decided to look to automation for a solution. What we cam up with is to continue to require that labels be put on versions of code when major builds where created. But we decided to augment that with automated daily labels.
SQL Server 2005 is coming soon and the setup team is looking for some feedback on their process. If you can spare a few minutes for a survey, they would greatly appreciate the time. And you will be helping others avoid the problems in the Betas.
At first glance, the 'ON DELETE SET NULL' option in SQL Server 2005 may not seem like a big deal, but once you've seen how it can be used, I think you will be impressed. The basics? If Order.CustomerID has a foreign key to Customer.CustomerID and a customer is deleted, 'ON DELETE SET NULL' causes the CustomerID field in each of that customer's orders to be set to NULL. It allows the "parent" record to be deleted and sets the "child" record's column to NULL. A normal foreign key says Order.CustomerID must match a record in Customer. An 'ON DELETE SET NULL' foreign key says that if Order.CustomerID is not null, then its value must match a record in Customer.
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