SQL Server Articles

Contained Databases have been an oft requested feature which has finally arrived in SQL Server 2012. In prior SQL Server versions, database were not 100% portable. In case you need to move a database from one server to another using backup and restore, the data in the database will of course be preserved. However, to [...]

Introduction In the Managing the Report Content Using Report Manager: Part I we saw how  to go about setting the security for the Report Manager report items. In this article we will be focusing on caching SSRS reports. Caching Caching is when a copy of the processed report after the execution is saved into into [...]

XQuery was developed by W3C as a query language designed to programmatically interact with and manipulate Extensible Markup Language (XML).  XQuery uses XPath methods and expressions to search and retrieve XML data.  In this article, I’d like to show a few simple, practical examples of these implementations. First, let’s create a table to hold sample [...]

What is A CTE? A CTE is a temporary view that exists only in the scope of running query. A CTE is similar to a view but a CTE is embedded into the query. CTEs can be used in Stored Procedures, User Define Functions (UDFs), Triggers and Views but not in Indexed Views. Below is [...]

Paging Data Paging is a big issue for developers as it is required for many applications but entails many performance problems.  Developers have used different workarounds to support paging. For example, assume we need to display several pages of the HumanResource.Employee object with 5 rows per page. Below is the query you need to execute [...]

What is Report Manager? Report Manager ships with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services and is a web application for managing deployed reports. The features of the report manager can be divided into following  types:- General Features: Creation of folders, folder hierarchies and data sources. Printing, searching, hiding, renaming, deleting ,downloading and moving the reports and data [...]

In the event that a transaction log grows to an out-of-control size, shrinking it can be the only solution – but don’t rush to do this until you are aware of the consequences. Shrinking the log could ‘break the log chain’ – rendering the existing transaction log backups useless. When this happens, the most recent [...]

Reporting Services comes with a built-in modeling tool called Report Model Designer which is used for developing adhoc reports. Due to their ease of creation, adhoc reports are often developed by end users as opposed to developers. The main purpose of the report model is to shred the dependency on the coding and give a [...]

In replication, the standard way of creating a publisher is to create a publication with a snapshot (which is what all the documentation recommends). However there are a few problems with this method: Creating the snapshots and then applying them is time consuming. Snapshots will consume disk space. There is an alternative to this, where [...]

Scenario: A couple of days back, I got a call from one of my users saying that the Data is not being replicated properly onto the Production Reporting Server from the Production OLTP server. We have Transactional Replication scheduled for every 15 minutes between our OLTP and the Reporting server. Approach: I started investigating this [...]