Friday, January 29, 2010

Laying out SQL Code

It is important to ensure that SQL code is laid out the best way for the team that has to use and maintain it. Before you work out how to enforce a standard, one has to work out what that standard should be for the application. So do you dive into detail or create an overall logic to the way it is done?

Friday, January 22, 2010

Uncovering Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs) (Part 2)

In this part of this multi-part series, I will provide the steps necessary in order to prepare two servers to be used in a two DAG member solution. Both Exchange 2010 servers are placed in the same Active Directory site in the same datacenter.

Uncovering Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs) (Part 1)

What an Exchange 2010 Database Availability Group (DAG) is all about and how this high availability feature may fit into your Exchange 2010 organization. Providing also step by step instructions on how to deploy DAG and other best practice recommendations.

Free Tools for the SQL Server DBA Part 2

Welcome to the second edition of "Free Tools for the SQL Server DBA". It has been a while since the original article was published in May 2007. Since that time, the number of free tools for SQL Server has continued to grow even though some have disappeared. This article covers tools not included in the original article.

All tools listed are free with no known expiration date. In order to download them, some sites will require you to register which might result in a phone call or e-mail from the vendor. Some tools are free versions of vendor's purchasable software with features disabled. While others tools are on par or better than what you can purchase.


http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Tools/64908/

Friday, January 15, 2010

Database Indexing Development Lifecycle...Say What?

This is the first article of a series where I’ll be exploring Indexing Guidelines. Having appropriate indexes on your database is critical in making sure your application is retrieving records quickly. However, having too many indexes can also slow down your application. In this series of articles, I hope to help you understand how to determine what columns you should consider for indexes, and how those columns should be used in indexes to optimize performance. In this first article, I will be discussing the indexing development lifecycle.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Using SSIS to zip files and email the zipped files

This article makes use of global variables throughout and shows how they can be used in SSIS, you can adapt these to make a package that can be made as flexible as you want. The package described here zips all files in a folder to a single archive zip file.

Pre Check List for 64 BIT SQL Server 2008 Cluster Installation

The purpose of this document is to help in the installation of SQL Server 2008 with tips and guidelines that I have found to work well in my environment. During installation I found missing information that was important for the successful installation of SQL Server 2008 (64 bit) on a Windows 2008 (64 bit) operating system in a cluster.