SQL Server Diaries

A while back I wrote a short post about the tablediff.exe command-line application. As a quick reminder, the tablediff.exe utilty can be used to compare table schema and/or data and generate a T-SQL script which can be used to bring the two in sync. [Read More]

SQL Server supports two authentication mechanisms, namely Windows and Mixed Mode. In Windows Authentication only accounts created on the local machine or domain accounts (users, groups, etc.) can be granted access to the SQL Server instance. This is the preferred and recommended (by Microsoft and most DBAs) implementation since the... [Read More]

Restoring databases is quite simple, especially if you’re using the GUI.  Just right-click on the Databases “folder” in SSMS, Choose the “Restore Database” option and the interface will prompt you for the database name, from where you want to restore, and other parameters.  I prefer scripting though.  One reason is... [Read More]

This week I had an interesting question: how to retrieve the structure of a table in XML format. [Read More]

This is another in a series of “scripts that generate scripts”; in this post I will be covering CHECK constraints. A CHECK constraint basically verifies that the value of the column it is checking evaluates to TRUE when the logical statement defining up the constraint is executed.  The definition of... [Read More]