External Article

Counting Parents and Children with Count Distinct

The aggregate functions in SQL Server (min, max, sum, count, average, etc.) are great tools for reporting and business analysis. But sometimes, you need to tweak them just a little bit to get exactly the results you need. For example, if your manager came to you and asked for a report on how many sales have been made to your clients and how large they were, would you know how to get the data you need efficiently? Mark ran into something like this recently and here's the approach he took to solve the problem.

Technical Article

SQL Server 2005 DB Snapshot: Imperfect Yet Useful?

Database Snapshot (DB Snapshot for short) is a new tool offered by SQL Server 2005. Database snapshots can be used to protect against user errors, by creating a "snapshot" of your data that you can refer to later if you need to recover data or database objects that were accidentally (or even intentionally) updated or dropped. While the feature is quite useful, it doesn’t provide a 100% guarantee against user errors.

Technical Article

Encrypting Without Secrets

Do you have a Web site or other system that deals in secrets of any sort? It seems like every time I give a security talk, people ask how to deal with the sticky problem of storing secrets. Connection strings with passwords are an obvious problem. You're better off simply using integrated security to get rid of those secrets, at least with SQL Server™, or an Oracle database. But what about credit card numbers and other financial or personal information? Can encryption help?

Technical Article

The CEO’s Guide to The Top 5 Issues that Misguide Business Intelligenc

When considering business intelligence (BI) software, it is essential to be aware of underlying issues that can seriously impact on your bottom line. In a country where most businesses have information stored in several different databases, it’s no secret that the BI strategy you choose will effect your profit and loss target. From data collection and integration to data analysis, the holy grail of Business Intelligence software combines your disparate databases to provide a decision support system that will enable you to make key conclusions using all of the available information.

SQLServerCentral Article

Brooke Philpott of sqlSentry

The guys that build software rarely get exposure of credit. Maybe that's why so many of them turn to open source where they get more well known. After a meeting at TechEd 2005, Andy Warren had the chance to get some interesting interview questions answered by Brooke Philpott, one of the 2 core developers of sqlSentry. And not a marketing guy.

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Question of the Day

The Last Binary Value of the Year

What does this code return? 

SELECT cast(0x2025 AS NVARCHAR(20))
Image 1: Image 2: Image 3: Image 4:

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