SQL Server General DBA

 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 [...]

In Part I of this series on physical join operators we looked at Nested Loops. We now turn our attention to the Merge 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 with a red back that need to [...]

SQL Server implements three different physical operators to perform joins. In this article series we will examine  how each  operators works, its advantages and challenges. We will try to understand the logic behind the optimizer’s decisions on which operator to use for various joins using (semi) real life examples and how to avoid common pitfalls. [...]

What is Default Trace? A default trace in SQL Server is a standard server side trace which is installed by default in SQL Server 2005 onwards. As BOL states: “Default trace provides troubleshooting assistance to database administrators by ensuring that they have the log data necessary to diagnose problems the first time they occur.” Thus [...]

In most companies, roles and responsibilities are clearly defined for the various teams, whether it is the database team, application team or the development team. In some cases, the application team might own a number of jobs but they may not have direct access or the high level privileges required to run it on the [...]

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Introduction Restoring any database is a critical task which will be  complicated by the database to be  restored being a publisher database. For the purposes of this article, I will assume familiarity with the different types of replication and their features. All   examples in this article  are with respect to transactional replication. Let us consider [...]