SQL Server Diaries

A developer asked about whether it was possible to store additional tags to identify the owner of a generic login or generic database user.  The below solution can be used to store this information and also offers further possibilities. [Read More]

An application developer asked me if there was an option in SQL Server to compare the contents/data of two tables without having to create a custom application.  There are various third party tools that can achieve this target however SQL Server comes with an out-of-the-box solution. [Read More]

I came across a tool that some might find useful.  The Forfiles on Microsoft Technet utility (forfiles.exe) is preinstalled with Windows Server 2003 and later.  Forfiles enables batch processing of files.  One use of this utility would be to delete old backup files to remove dependencies on items such as... [Read More]

Also known as Globally Unique Identifiers, GUID values consist of a string of alphanumeric values which in principle should be unique across all machines of the network.  GUID values are stored in a database table using the uniqueidentifier (Transact-SQL) data type and requires 16 bytes of storage space per row.... [Read More]

Managing SQL Server applications can be a bit tricky, especially in an enterprise scenario with tens or hundreds of applications deployed for a large user-base across geographically dispersed locations.  With a bit of planning, events such as database migrations, DBMS upgrade, or server virtualisation to name a few, can be... [Read More]