Renaming Databases was just published on SSC, another in my lastest effort to expose some of the hidden complexities in seemingly routine operations. Definitely read the discussion thread attached to the article as there were several very good additional tips suggested.
This was actually posted about a week ago, fell behind a little during travelling. Building a Security Philosophy was written to get people to think about they approach security. Do you give the proverbial Junior DBA only partial access? Do you believe in table access? Do you use the built in roles?
I have opinions on the topic, but it's not clear that there are always right answers, and definitely some that are situational. Many of us have the philosophy that we acquired at the first job, or from the first manager or peer - at some point it's worth revisiting to decide if we still agree with those principles held for so long!
Moving Tempdb isn't a common operation, and mercifully a simple one if it comes to that. As in much of the stuff I write about I wanted to put down a nice detailed answer to a pretty simple question. Think you know how it works? What happens to the original tempdb mdf/ldf if you move tempdb? Do they move? Get deleted? Read the article:-)
Rebuilding Stats was published yesterday on SSC, some nice comments posted to it as well. The main point of the article was that if you're rebuilding indexes with the default options you're automatically getting stats update on those columns as well.
It's been a while since I had anything up on SSC, a combination of Steve being in good shape on content and me being busier than usual, but early July I had a break and got 4 articles done. Disabling indexes isn't a complicated option of course, but one of the things I see in classes is that we all tend to use a pretty narrow subset of the available functionality, for better or worse! Articles like this are hopefully ways to expand the set of tools you use, much in the same way you read the word of the day (you do read that don't you?).
I wrote this article on computed columns to support some of the teaching I do for my beginner to intermediate level performance tuning class. It's not a technique you'll apply that often, but I think it's used less often than perhaps it should be. Hope you'll take a look and add a comment to the article.
Partitioning Part 4 concludes the series with a look at 'real' partitioning in SQL 2005 Enterprise Edition. Overall the series worked out reasonably well, accomplished my goal of introducing the technology and options without getting into dense technical detail. There is definitely more to explore in partioning than I've covered!
This was fun to write, though it's hard to boil everything down to 10 big steps. I thnk as an industry we tend to forget that there are a LOT of us wearing multiple hats, working solo, just trying to get things done - and while we want to do things the right way, there isn't always clear guidance to help is figure it all out. This is a very short attempt at starting to map that out.
A short article but interesting I think, with some good comments already. I think in general triggers are under used, except in the cases where they are abused of course. Here's the article: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/61483/
Most people 'set it and forget it' when it comes to replication, not realizing that changes to rows on the publisher are applied one row at a time on the subscriber using the system generated procs created on the subscriber. I actually tend to agree with the concept, opting for a vanilla implementation whenever possible! Needing to update or delete a large number of rows is one place where vanilla plus a dab of butterscotch in the form of replicating stored procedure execution can make a big difference in overall time/resource usage.
Here's the link: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/61332/
This is an older article that was recycled for Fri, but still seems to get a decent number of views and some good discussion. It's fun to see who sees the power of Access and not just the pain! I still use Access for some really adhoc reporting and for one off data changes, just faster than SSMS in most cases. Not because the tool is faster, it just has a better UI.
The article is at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Access/linkingaccesstosqlserver/2176/.
This went up today and there is one great comment about possibly using snapshot isolation as an alternative to the techiques I described. It's the best part of SSC; reading the article plus the comments really gives you an interesting view of the subject at hand.
The article is at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Database+Design/61335/.
All of these are new articles that have gone up on SSC recently. The troubleshooting one was my attempt to get people to think about troubleshooting before it's needed. It's much like debugging; those that are good at it typically get to the resolution much faster than those that tackle the problem without benefit of a plan and experience. The ones on replication delivery options are less interesting but good tactical knowledge.
I wrote this up based on some questions in our recent BI class where we spend almost a full day on the basics of Reporting Services. Not the most exciting topic, but useful at times. I've still got some writing to do to finish explaining the security options for datasources which was also a topic that came up. From a teaching perspective it's useful to create content that supplements courseware and a nice perk is you usually learn something in the process.
Article is posted at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/awarren/3184.asp
