Dimensional Modeling 101 - Time vs Date

When most DW designers begin developing a data warehouse, the Time dimension is the first dimension reviewed with the users. There are usually two or three different persectives on what the Time dimension should represent but, for the most part, it will be used for such calculations as Year-to-date Sales, Monthly Inventory Churn, etc. What most users are actually describing is a Date, or Calendar dimension.

Stored Procedure Naming Conventions

As your SQL Server applications grow, chances are that you have more and more objects, especially stored procedures that you need to keep track of. An organized environment is key to being able to prevent the duplication of code and effort. Joe Sack brings us a look at how he names stored procedures to easy identification.

Debugging in Visual Studio.NET 2005

Debugging is an important process for any level of programming to ensure programs function as expected. Most productive developer environments provide tools and utilities to assist with the debugging process. Visual Studio.NET 2005 is equipped with a number of debugger visualizers, but users can also create their own based on an individual project.

Logins, Users, and Roles - Getting Started

Do you know the difference between a login and a user? What's the best way to add them; Enterprise Manager, T-SQL, or SQL-DMO? In this beginner level article Andy demonstrates how to use all three methods to add logins and users and offers his view of which is the best technique.

Stored procedure: Search character columns for a given string

This tip continues the system stored procedure series with a routine to find occurrences of a string in the character columns of selected tables.

Query Analyzer Extended

SQL Server has the best client tools for a DBA of any RDBMS and SQL Server 2000 includes Query Analyzer, an amazing tool. There are a few places where this tool could use some improvement and Yakov Shlafman brings us a few ways that you make your work with Query Analyzer even smoother.

Minimizing the need to restore a backup

The second installment of this series discussed the cost of maintaining systems with various levels of downtime, ways data can be lost, and what constitutes a backup. In this installment, I discuss how to configure your hardware to minimize the need to restore a backup.

Manipulating Text Columns

One of the lesser used features of SQL Server is the work with text variables. These data types cannot always be manipulated with regular T-SQL. Raj Vasant brings us an introductory look at the various functions you can use to work with these fields.

File Watcher Task

The File Watcher Task does what it says really, it watches a folder waiting for files. When an available file is found the task completes, returning the name of the file for later use.

The task will detect changes to existing files as well as new files, both actions will cause the file to be found when available. A file is available when the task can open it exclusively. This is important for files that take a long time to be written, such as large files, or those that are just written slowly or delivered via a slow network link.

Database Design and Reference Tables

Whether you are building SQL Server 2000 applications or getting ready for the new features in SQL Server 2005, there are many fundamental database design principals that should be followed. New author Ranga Narasimhan brings us a look at how he handles reference tables when designing a database..