SQL Server Articles

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 [...]

In Implementing Transactions Part I I briefly described the role of Transactions in SQL Server and outlined a very basic implementation. In this second part, I will explain how a DBA can best implement Transactions in scripts that are to be deployed on production databases. One of the regular tasks of a DBA is to [...]

A basic requirements in most SQL Server based applications is implementing a database operation (DDL or DML) in a single unit of work. The DDL requirement is more from a DBA’s perspective rather than the application, since any application would perform only INSERTs, UPDATEs and DELETEs on the existing data, and a DBA would be [...]

New Built-in Functions in SQL Server 2012 SQL Server 2012 (Code named SQL Server Denali) introduces 14 new built in functions in four different categories with one existing function (LOG) being modified to have an optional second base parameter: Category Function Name Conversion functions PARSE TRY_CONVERT TRY_PARSE Date and Time functions DATEFROMPARTS DATETIME2FROMPARTS DATETIMEFROMPARTS DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS [...]

The Business Intelligence Semantic Model is one of the most significant enhancements in SQL Server 2012. BISM allows aspects of the traditional multidimensional model to coexist with the relational model in a format called the tabular model and can be used with all client tools in the Microsoft BI stack. The tabular model has its [...]

I recently encountered a situation where the drive hosting Sharepoint Databases in a Staging environment ran out of space. I logged onto the server and found that the msdb database has itself occupied 38 GB of the total disk space. Msdb database generally contain maintenance information for the database such as backups, log shipping and [...]

Recently I encountered a situation where the backup drive was short of space on the production server. The policy on the production server was that as soon as soon as the Full Backup is complete, a copy of the production backup is transferred to the staging server using RoboCopy and then on the staging server [...]