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Duplicate records in a database are bad. You can’t tolerate them. At the very least, they’ll produce misleading analysis. At the worst, they’ll totally wreck everything. Your application will probably run, but everything it generates will be suspect. You have to find them and delete them or your client might just delete you!

Of course, the applications you develop prevent duplicates from the get go — pat yourself on the back. However, your keen insight into the potential problems duplicates pose won’t help you if you inherit a legacy application or have to import dirty data. The good news is that finding and deleting duplicate records in Microsoft’s SQL Server isn’t a difficult task. However, determining just what constitutes a duplicate can be a bit tricky.

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As a database administrator, I like automation. When it comes to my backups, I like to automate as much as possible. SQL Mail gives me the ability to know when my backups are successful and when they fail.

SQL Mail is a component of SQL Server that allows you to send mail. Some of its functions include the ability to send messages to an e-mail pager and to send results via the extended stored procedure (xp_sendmail).

SQL Mail allows you to send and receive e-mail by working side by side with a mail server. There are two services that handle SQL Mail with SQL Server 2000: MSSQLServer and SQLServerAgent. I am going to explain how to configure and take advantage of this hidden gem.

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DBAs often have to find the differences between lookup tables in different database environments (i.e., development, quality-assurance, staging, and production). The data in these lookup tables are required to be the same across environments to ensure that your testing is accurate.

There are a variety of great tools on the market that will run these comparisons, as well as perform many other functions. You don’t need to go out and buy one because SQL Server comes with a tool called TableDiff that will do this for you.

TableDiff allows you to easily compare the data in tables, and it creates scripts for you to synchronize lookup data between your testing and production environments. TableDiff is also very useful for synchronizing data between production servers and replication servers to accommodate for when replication problems occur.

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New Version of the World’s Most Popular Open Source Database Delivers up to 15 Percent Higher Performance for Large-Scale Enterprise Applications.
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What is a Dates table?
A Dates table stores a range of dates. Dates tables are very common in a DateWarehouse as a dimension table. You can also use Dates tables in OLTP databases for lookups. When programmers use Dates tables, they don’t have to worry about using or designing functions for handling or formatting dates in the database. It is a precompilation of a wide range of date values and their associated month, quarter, year, etc.

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A common misconception among IT pros is that “locks are bad,” and you must do everything possible to ensure database locking doesn’t prevent processes from running. In order to ensure a consistent database environment, the database engine must use a mechanism to acquire exclusive use of a resource when that resource is being modified.

SQL Server uses locks to achieve this consistency. Locks are objects that the database engine uses to ensure that only one thread can access a resource at a time. Without the use of locks, concurrent data modifications would be possible by separate processes, which could potentially leave the database in an inconsistent state. Locks are a good thing, but you should plan your applications in such a way to minimize the number of database locks involved.

Here are details about a stored procedure that enables you to diagnose your database locking issues.

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PS
I’m using MSSQL Blocks .

The Bulk Copy Program (BCP) is a command-line utility that ships with Microsoft SQL Server. With BCP, you can import and export large amounts of data in and out of SQL Server databases quickly and easily. Any DBA who has utilized this functionality will agree that BCP is an essential tool.
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If you work with databases, at some point, you’ll deal with inserting data into SQL Server from outside data files. This tutorial shows how to import data using the BULK INSERT command and explains how changing some of its options can make it easier and more efficient to insert data.
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If you ever work with directory structures on the filing system, you know how challenging it can be to traverse through folders to find specific file(s). If you store this type of information structure in the database, you are even more aware of what it takes to retrieve the data. Writing queries to pull this information is sometimes difficult to achieve and inefficient. You can use the recursion and XML features in SQL Server 2005 to build a file location on the fly.
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A dynamic SQL statement is constructed at execution time, for which different conditions generate different SQL statements. It can be useful to construct these statements dynamically when you need to decide at run time what fields to bring back from SELECT statements; the different criteria for your queries; and perhaps different tables to query based on different conditions.
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The ability to automate administrative tasks is vital in almost any SQL Server database environment. In the SQL Server world, this scheduling of work is known as a “Job.” It allows you to perform such tasks as database maintenance, invoke executables, ActiveX script, Integration Services packages, and business transactions.

I’ll show you how to develop a SQL Server Job from scratch to monitor the size of the database files on your server.

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It’s very important to capture trends of the sizes of your SQL Server 2005 database because it allows you to plan for future space needs, notice types of problems, and plan for time periods of heavy volume. I’ll show you the simple method that I use to capture this information.
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The PostgreSQL Global Development Group is proud to announce the release of PostgreSQL 8.3, the world’s most advanced open source database.

Any time you need to modify objects in your SQL Server 2005 database, the objects that are dependent upon those objects are a concern. You don’t want to remove columns from tables, procedures, views, or tables if there are objects dependent upon them that are being used.

This tutorial will show how you can write a procedure that will look up all of the objects that are dependent upon other objects.

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