SQL Server General DBA

Recently I came across with an article on DB2 about using Union instead of OR. So I thought of carrying out a research on SQL Server on what scenarios UNION is optimal in and which scenarios OR would be best. I will analyze this with a few scenarios using samples taken  from the AdventureWorks database [...]

Continuing from Part 1  , our Migration Checklist continues: Step 5: Update statistics It is always a good idea to update the statistics of the database that you have just installed or migrated. To do this, run the following command against the target database: sp_updatestats The sp_updatestats system stored procedure runs the UPDATE STATISTICS command [...]

Adding a column to a table is  common task for  DBAs. You can add a column to a table which is a nullable column or which has default values. But are these two operations are similar internally and which method is optimal? Let us start this with an example. I created a database and a [...]

Introduction Database Administrators have always had a tough time to ensuring that all the SQL Servers administered by them are configured according to the policies and standards of organization. Using SQL Server’s  Policy Based Management feature DBAs can now manage one or more instances of SQL Server 2008 and check for policy compliance issues. In [...]

Problem When using transactional replication to replicate data in a one way topology from a publisher to a read-only subscriber(s) there is no need to manage identity ranges. However, when using  transactional replication to replicate data in a two way replication topology – between two or more servers there is a need to manage identity [...]

I was recently asked to set up Transactional Replication comprising of 29 publishers as well as same number of subscribers. One interesting challenge was that the size of the distribution database suddenly increased from few MB’s to around 62 GB and as a result the disk on which the production database was hosted quickly filled [...]

Note : The scripts for this article can be downloaded here. Monitoring the distribution queue is an important link in the chain of transactions delivery over a replicated topology. A chain that includes the log reader agent scanning the published database’s transaction log for commands to be moved to the distribution database from which a [...]

A recent blog entry I read reminded me again that I wanted to rant about an issue in SQL Server for quite some time now… SQL Server 2005 introduced the separation between user and schema. Though schemata already existed  before SQL Server 2005, they really became usable with this version, imho. At the same time  [...]

To easily manage the permissions in our databases, Microsoft has provided several roles in SQL Server which are security principals that group other principals. They are like groups in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Database-level roles are database-wide in their permissions scope. The various types of SQL Server fixed database roles are as follows: · [...]

The IDENTITY property for a column of a numerical data type is a frequently used method to achieve system-generated “uniqueness” for each row in a table. Such a column then in turn is a quite popular choice for the PRIMARY KEY constraint. Most of the times one would choose the data type int for the [...]