Downloads from this Issue

• A Discussion on Indexes, Tables and Designing for Performance with SQL Server MVP and Microsoft Regional Director, Kimberly L. Tripp (download now)
• Timestamp Collecting on the Web (download now)

Table of Contents

Reporting Services: Writing Your Own Report
by Mike Pearson

If you’ve not yet had a chance to dabble with Reporting Services and you’re wondering where to start, then this article is just for you. We’re going to cover some of the basics that go into creating a report, which should give you a pretty good start to get you going towards bigger and better things!

Ownership Chaining Explained
by Brian Kelley

One of the security features within SQL Server is the concept of ownership chaining. It forms a valuable piece of the overall security architecture puzzle, yet I often see questions and confusion about how exactly ownership chaining works and why it is necessary.

Log Shipping On A Shoestring Budget
by John Ryle

There are a great many products out there to assist in disaster recovery and failover for SQL Server. Many such products claim near-real time recovery of all data. While some of these products have come a long way, they generally come at a lofty price tag, and can often increase the overhead to the point where any gain in failover is negated by diminishing performance on your primary server.

DBA Lifecycle
by Stuart Magee

Because the typical duties of a Database Administrator can vary so much from one Enterprise to the next, there is no such animal as a “typical” DBA. But despite the differences, there is an undeniable set of core responsibilities all DBAs strive to fulfill within an organization.

Using the XML Data type in Yukon
by Vinod Kumar and Srinivas Sampath

The next generation of SQL Server named SQL Server 2005 (a.k.a Yukon) is full of promise and gives the power of coding in SQL Server a new dimension altogether. In this article we will see one such feature that has been talked in almost all the discussions on SQL Server 2005, the XML data type.

Real World Disaster
by Stuart Magee

We’re starting a new series about some of the disasters we’ve all had in the the course of our daily work. If you’ve got one and wish to see your name in print, or not, send it to “articles@sqlservercentral.com” and the best one will get printed here. The rest will get released on www.sqlservercentral.com.

DB History - Part 1
by Kevin Knudson

You are doing the annual budget for next year, and as the DBA you need to predict how much disk space your database(s) will need in the future. How much growth has occurred? Are there unusual peaks in space requirements? These questions prompted me to create something to automatically collect and save historical information about the various databases in our organization.

A Discussion on Indexes, Tables and Designing for Performance with SQL Server MVP and Microsoft Regional Director, Kimberly L. Tripp
by Nancy Hidy

An interview with Kimberly Tripp on a variety of performance topics.
(Download Sample Code)

Timestamp Collecting on the Web
by Kurt Windisch

One option to handle concurrency in database applications is to include a timestamp column in your tables and use the primary key column(s) along with the timestamp column to control concurrency.
(Download Sample Code)