SQL Server General DBA

General In this article I introduce a simple process that saves tables size information at points in time which latter allows for tracking down table growth over time. The process is useful in monitoring data growth over time and lets you see what tables are growing rapidly in what databases and can also help in [...]

General Database concurrency can be defined as the number of users that can work at a given database at the same time while not effecting or interfering with eachother’s work. The greater the number of users working at the same time the higher concurrency is. SQL Server holds Locks on user data to protect data [...]

As  DBAs, we are often required to set up alert notification emails for various tasks. For example, there might be a requirement to set up notification alerts if a particular backup job fails. A while back, I  came across the situation where I was asked to write a script which sent an email alert to [...]

Introduction In this article we will set up an email notification at the SQL Server level whenever SQL Server and the SQL Server Agent Restarts. The article will   useful for DBA’s who support a large number of database servers which they cannot manually connect to   daily to check the SQL Server status, SQL job status [...]

Terms used in this article Execution or SQL Execution represents a call to a Stored Procedure or an SQL Batch. General Description This process creates a Baseline repository that holds summarized data of all SQL Executions executed on an instance of SQL Server. The repository lights up your SQL Server’s activity and exposes interesting information [...]

This article demonstrates how to manage database projects with Visual Studio 2010.

 Introduction Data Compression was first introduced in SQL Server 2005 with Service Pack 2 when Microsoft introduced a new storage format called VARDECIMAL to store decimal and numeric data types as variable length columns. In SQL Server 2008, Microsoft enhanced Data Compression feature to compress fixed length data types such as INTEGER, CHAR and FLOAT. [...]

AS DBAs we often need to develop DML triggers to capture multiple entries which are either INSERTED, UPDATED or DELETED from a table. A few months back, I came across a situation where the Application Development Team asked me to write a logic  to notify the DBA  if any records were either INSERTED,UPDATED or DELETED [...]

Microsoft released the final version of SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition on April 21, 2010. SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition continues to ship in 4 different packages. One can download Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition from the following link. In this article we will take a look at SQL Server 2008 [...]

In second part of this series on physical join operators we looked at the Merge Operator. In the final part of the series we turn our attention to the Hash operator. For this article series I am using an analogy of two sets of standard playing cards. One set with a blue back and another [...]