By Jerry Cochran – What if Microsoft Exchange Server had the built-in capability to keep a standby server online for disaster recovery? This server would be readily available if the primary Exchange server went down, and it could quickly open a new copy of the Exchange database with up-to-the-minute

by Jeff Garbus – Solid State Accelerators make it possible for you to give your peripheral storage the speed of memory. Essentially, a Solid State Accelerator is Solid State memory technology with an attitude, which emulates a conventional disk drive or array. It includes a built-in UPS backup syste

This article describes how to properly configure your mail client so that it works with SQL Mail. The article also describes some common pitfalls that you might encounter when you set up SQL Mail to work with Exchange or Internet mail servers. SQL Mail establishes a simple Mail Application Pr

A database must have a solid security system to control which activities can be performed and which information can be viewed and modified. A solid security system ensures the protection of data, regardless of how users gain access to the database. This section describes the security tools bu

By Brian Moran – In my July 19 commentary, I discussed Microsoft’s Software Assurance (SA) program and how it might impact your ability to upgrade SQL Server (see the URL below). Because the October 1 transition date to SA is looming and Microsoft has made a few changes to the program since I origin

One of the purposes of Extensible Markup Language (XML) is to solve challenges like this, but until all applications become XML-enabled, consider using our faithful standby, the bulk copy program (bcp) utility. This utility can do more than just dump a table; bcp also can take its input from a view

By Aaron Skonnard – R oughly five years ago Microsoft introduced the Universal Data Access (UDA) architecture, which promised to simplify working with enterprise data. The UDA strategy promoted exposing data through a single suite of COM interfaces known collectively as OLE DB, the idea being that

The downturn in the economy has left quite a few technical people out of work. This ongoing article describes the experiences over the past two years of Steve Jones. Reader experiences are requested and the article will be updated weekly.

Version 1.5 adds right-click menu support, faster analysis capabilities, the ability to limit traces/analyses to a set of users or applications, the ability to analyze only those SQL statements that perform according to a set of user-defined criteria like reads, writes, CPU, or duration, the ability

by Jimmy Nilsson – Not all of the XML support in SQL Server 2000 is useful in real world applications in my opinion. I’m thinking of the possibility to send queries to SQL Server by HTTP and receive the answer as XML documents. The security problems with that seem to be huge in the current version.