Collecting performance counters and using SQL Server to analyze the data

The following will explain how to select counters, how to collect data, how to load the data to SQL Server and how to query the data that has been saved.

Database level permissions for SQL Server 2005 and 2008

SQL Server 2005 introduced a new concept to SQL Server security and permissions: securables. Securables are anything within SQL Server that can have a permission assigned. One such securable is the database.

These are the list of database-level permissions.

Exploring SQL Server 2008’s Filtered Indexes

One of the most interesting features in SQL Server 2008 is filtered indexes. Let’s start with a quick explanation and then dig into the details and results.

A filtered index is simply an index with a WHERE clause. For example, if you have a table where a date is NULL in 90% of the records but you need to be able to find only records with a non-NULL date, a filtered index will have only the 10% that are not NULL.

It can be very useful for saving space, saving index maintenance costs, and making queries run faster. However, it is important to understand under whatcircumstances it will make your query faster.

Handling workloads on SQL Server 2008 with Resource Governor

Handling workloads has been quite difficult until SQL Server 2005. For example consider a scenario where one SQL instance is serving two applications i.e. an OLTP application and a reporting/data warehousing application. Since reporting applications are normally resource intensive, it may consume all the SQL Server available resources and may hamper the OLTP application which ideally should have more preference over the reporting application.

To handle this scenario, in earlier version of SQL Server there was one option to create multiple instances for these application (segregating by running one application on each instance) and setting CPU affinity mask for these instances appropriately. But the problems with this approach are, first it works for CPU only and second the dedicated CPUs cannot be shared by other SQL Server instances. For example, if there are two SQL Server instances and instance one has been assigned CPU 1 and 2 and instance two has been assigned CPU 3 and 4 on a four processor machine, even if instance one is idle and instance two is in need of additional resources, it can only use CPU 3 and 4.  So what does SQL 2008 offer to solve this issue?

Deleting duplicate Records using SQLCMD

This article presents an approach to showing and deleting duplicate records that is concise, generic and efficient. It uses some features that were introduced in SQL Server 2005.

SQLFury - An SQL injection scanner, using blind SQL injection techniques to extract information from a target database

SQL Injection Scanner:

An SQL injection scanner, using blind SQL injection techniques to extract information from a target database. 

Database Support:

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Oracle

Microsoft SQL Server

Extract from database:

Database version.

Current database user.

All database users.

Database name.

All database names.

All table names.

All columns names.

Entire columns.

How to back up Hyper-V virtual machines from the parent partition on a Windows Server 2008-based computer by using Windows Server Backup

This article describes how to back up Hyper-V virtual machines from the parent partition on a Windows Server 2008-based computer by using Windows Server Backup.

To back up Hyper-V virtual machines from the parent partition on Windows Server 2008 by using Windows Server Backup, you must register the Microsoft Hyper-V VSS writer with Windows Server Backup.

To register the Hyper-V VSS writer with Windows Server Backup, follow these steps.