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Finding Duplicate Indexes in Large SQL Server Databases

One important component of tuning a large, heavily used database, is to ensure that the tables are indexed optimally: enough indexing, but not too much indexing for the application you are running. There are rules of thumb about index tuning, but the entire issue is so complex that there's no "silver bullet" solution that will work for every case. However, in tuning indexes we can generally say that it's not a good idea to maintain duplicate indexes on the same data. SQL Server does not provide checks to prevent duplicate indexes from being created, as long as the names are different

External Article

Are UDFs Harmful to SQL Server Performance?

SQL Server 2000 introduced user-defined functions (UDFs), and they were immediately hailed as a great tool for encapsulating repetitive code, as well as allowing you to perform more complicated processing directly in an SQL expression. On its face, that claim is valid. You can certainly improve readability and maintainability with UDFs. But cleaner code will be cold comfort if your queries bog down and lock up your server.

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Generating Test Data with Integration Services

DTS was one of the most amazing new features of SQL Server 7 and in SQL Server 2005 it has been renamed to Integration Services. This component has some incredible new capabilities, many of which come at a steep learning curve. New author Kristian Wedberg brings us a basic article and some code on how you can SSIS to generate test data.

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Executing the result set

SQL Server Database administrators often generate SQL Statements and execute the generated SQL statement in order to simplify certain tasks. It has always been a twin operation. This article illustrates how to use un-documented stored procedures to execute the generated SQL Statements directly.

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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:

See possible answers