SQLServerCentral Article

The DBA Whoops

Ever do something to your SQL Server 2000 server and then realize you've just broken something major? Ever have a moment when you want to go "whoops", but really feel like crying ot running away? Steve Jones just had one of those and gives you a few things to think about when you deal with a situation like that.

External Article

SQL Server 2005 - SQL Server Integration Services - Part 3

This is the third article of our series discussing SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS), which provides Extraction, Transformation, and Loading features, replacing Data Transformation Services (DTS) available in SQL Server 2000 and 7.0. We have already presented an overview of the basic concepts necessary to design and implement SSIS-based projects. We have also stepped through the creation of one such project using Business Intelligence Development Studio. Our sample SSIS package, described in our previous article, delivered the basic functionality we needed (running an external process and loading the outcome of its execution stored temporarily in a text file into a database), however, it had one major shortcoming - a lack of support for reusability.

External Article

SQL Server 2005 - SQL Server Integration Services - Part 2

In the first article of this series, we presented the basic concepts relevant to understanding SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, which is the primary mechanism for Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) functionality available in SQL Server 2005. We also provided a quick overview of tools that allow you to manage such activities as DTS package design, development, and storage, as well as interactive and scheduled execution. In order to gain better familiarity with each of these activities, we will look at them from a more practical perspective, using a number of fairly straightforward examples.

External Article

SQL Server 2005 - SQL Server Integration Services - Part 1

One of the SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 features that has undergone considerable architectural, functional, and interface changes, compared with its earlier versions, deals with extraction, transformation, and loading (also known as simply ETL) of data. (In other words, allowing you to move data between a variety of stores and to modify it in the process, according to your arbitrary requirements). While in SQL Server 7.0 and 2000, such capabilities have been provided by Data Transformation Services (DTS in short), Microsoft decided that the degree of modifications introduced in the new version justified re-branding it, hence its rearchitectured and significantly improved implementation has been introduced under the new name of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

External Article

Introduction to C# for DBA's

This is the first article in a series on writing stored procedures using the Common Language Runtime (CLR). This article focuses on basic C# syntax and using Visual Studio to build a stored procedure. It's targeted at DBA's and anyone else who primarily writes in Transact-SQL and hasn't had much exposure to .NET yet.

SQLServerCentral Article

Real World Query Plans

The SQL Server 2000 Query Optimizer is one of the more complicated things that a SQL Server DBA deals with. For most of us, we just let it work and do not give it a second thought. But when a crisis occurred, Andy and Steve had to dive in to learn a few more things about it.

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Multiple Deployment Processes

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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases

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Upgrading Admin Queries

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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