One the more welcomed enhancements of SQL Server 2005 Notification Services was the new Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Nmo namespace. The namespace provides classes that may be used develop and administer SSNS instances and applications.
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As many of you may know, for the past six years I've volunteered my time and energy to an organization called PASS - the Professional Association for SQL Server. It's a wonderful organization of highly dedicated, talented, and personable SQL Server professionals from around the world.
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In a prior posting, I demonstrated how the undocumented sp_MSforeachtable stored procedure can be used to iterate through each of the tables within a database. In a separate posting earlier this year, I also demonstrated how the DBCC CLEANTABLE command can be employed to reclaim space that was once consumed by variable length character columns that have been subsequently dropped.
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In my initial post here on the SQLTeam site, I mentioned that for the prior three years I had blogged on another site. That blog was almost exclusively dedicated to SQL Server Notification Services.
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In a recent post, I demonstrated how SQL Server will reuse space made available when rows are deleted from a table. This occurs automatically without any outside intervention on our part.
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If you've ever attended a DevTeach/SQLTeach event, you already know that it's a wonderful and intimate community-driven event designed to provide top-notch .NET and SQL Server developer education in an up close and personal environment.
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A question that occasionally comes up from people who have made the switch to Microsoft SQL Server from Microsoft Access is "If I delete a bunch of rows, do I need to compact my SQL Server database?
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Even though SQL Server 2008 does not include the Notification Services (SSNS) component, it seems that companies still consider SSNS a very viable option for upcoming notification projects. I'm planning to write a blog or SQLTeam article in the near future to address some questions I'm frequently asked.
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Microsoft's Ken Henderson hosted a web cast called “Introducing Notification Services in SQL Server 2005”. It was recorded three years, but it’s still a great material. If you’ve ever sat in on one of his sessions at PASS, you know he’s a great presenter.
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If you've worked with Microsoft SQL Server in a production environment for any length of time, you've undoubtedly been exposed to a number of different error messages. For example, many of us are probably familiar, too familiar perhaps, with error 1205 - the dreaded "you've been chosen as the victim of a deadlock" message.
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Year in and year out, the week of the PASS Community Summit is one of the highlights of my professional life. There are a lot of good things about the Summit, far too many for me to enumerate here.
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A recent ZDNet article highlighted an event where two United Kingdom officials demonstrated just how vulnerable a new, but not updated, Microsoft Windows system can be. It took one official from the Serious Organized Crime Agency a mere 11 minutes to discover the target computer on a wireless network, crack into it using open source tools that are commonly available on the Internet, and steal password files.
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One of the things I really like about teaching technical classes is getting to know and talk with students, learning of the challenges they face and how they've addressed them. Frequently, I can learn from their experiences, too.
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As database administrators or developers, sometimes we need to perform an action on all of the tables within a database. For example, we may want to disable check constraints for all tables prior to loading a bunch of data; or perhaps we need to run DBCC CHECKTABLE for every table in our database to ensure the integrity of all pages and structures that make up the tables.
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Thanks to all of you who attended the DevLink Technical Conference in Nashville, Tennessee! It was great to see such a turnout for the event. Big kudos goes to all those who carried the load and championed this event.
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In a recent post, I demonstrated how the sys.procedures catalog view could be used to determine the date and time that a stored procedure was last modified in SQL Server 2005.
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In SQL Server, much like other services with users, login accounts can be enabled or disabled. An enabled login can be authenticated and allowed access to database resources. A disabled login is not allowed to establish a connection to the SQL Server instance.
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Ever wondered if it is possible to programmatically determine when the SQL Server service for an instance was last started? It would be nice to have a built-in function that explicitly reports the time of the last service start, but one doesn't exist.
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Have you ever been troubleshooting a SQLNS instance and noticed the status code column in some of the views and underlying tables? For example, the NSSMTPNotifications view has a column named DeliveryStatusCode with a values that range from 0 to 6.
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Recently, a client asked that I grant database access for several of their new employees. The client uses SQL Server 2000 and has an Active Directory in place to manage domain users and resources.
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