SQL Server Pro News Articles

SQL Injection – Beyond the Basics

Michael K. Campbell — Wed, 23 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT

By Michael K. Campbell
Ensuring a proper understanding of core concepts and avoiding common pitfalls are the keys to protecting against SQL injection.

Product Review: NetWrix SQL Server Change Reporter 2.2

Robert Pearl — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:00:00 GMT

By: Robert Pearl
This change-auditing solution lets you monitor, track, and report changes occurring on multiple SQL Server instances across a company.

Introducing Microsoft Power View

Tyler Chessman — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:17:00 GMT

By Tyler Chessman
Power View is an easy-to-use business intelligence (BI) tool that helps people make sense of their data.

Using Registered Servers in SSMS

Sarbjit Singh Gugnani — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:11:00 GMT

By Sarbjit Singh Gugnani
The Registered Servers tool in SQL Server Management Studio lets you easily save the connection information for multiple SQL Server instances.

Query Performance Tuning

Denny Cherry — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:27:00 GMT

By Denny Cherry
Performance tuning is half science and half art form. Learn about the science half of the tuning process.

T-SQL Best Practices, Part 2

Itzik Ben-Gan — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:07:00 GMT

By Itzik Ben-Gan
Itzik continues his discussion of T-SQL best practices; he discusses cloud compatibility, date and time best practices, the importance of writing in a standard way, and performance-related best practices.

Things You Might Not Know about SQL Server 2012

Michael Otey — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:38:00 GMT

By Michael Otey
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 has major new features, such as the new Business Intelligence edition, as well as smaller changes to licensing and a new LocalDB edition.

SQL Server Database Corruption–Part X: Page Level Restore Operations

Michael K. Campbell — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:18:46 GMT

By Michael K. Campbell
In my previous post in my ongoing series on SQL Server database corruption I covered a list of best practices for responding to database corruption when it happens. In that post I mentioned that I’d provide a follow-up post on the specifics of how to execute page-level restore operations from within SQL Server. Page Level Restore Operations As documented in Books Online, SQL Server’s RESTORE DATABASE command has an optional parameter or switch that instructs it to only restore one or more pages instead of an entire database – which is very handy and helpful in dealing with situations in which only a hand-full of pages have been corrupted by some sort of problem with the IO subsystem. Accordingly, the basic order of operations for this kind of operation is as follows Kick the database into single user mode. You can set the database to RESTRICTED_USER, but if you have end-users or applications connecting using logins that map to the db_owner role, they’ll still be able to connect to the database. So use SINGLE_USER mode instead and do NOT close the query window you use to set to SINGLE_USER. To set the database to SINGLE_USER mode, execute the following: ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK AFTER 10 SECONDS GO And note that the WITH ROLLBACK AFTER n SECONDS option can/will kill connections and on-going operations. It’s documented in here (towards the end of the page). Likewise note that to pull this recovery operation off you’re, OBVIOUSLY, kicking everyone out of the database. Then, START your recovery process by backing up the tail-end of the log file – or the portion of your log file that hasn’t already been backed up. (This is CRITICAL as it ensures that all operations up to a certain point have been accounted for. And you’ll want to do this AFTER switching the database to SINGLE_USER mode – otherwise you risk allowing a few operations to ‘sneak’ by – which means that end-users or