SQL Server Engine Tips

Did you know that SQL Server 2005 supports renaming logins? This can be done via ALTER LOGIN statement. I posted a sample about renaming sa login and disabling it before. But it is probably not obvious if you can do it for all logins. Ex: ALTER LOGIN...

An MVP recently sent us an email asking how to use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views to access temp tables. This MVP thought the session ID (spid) was needed to construct the suffix. Here was our response: ========================= Hi, The algorithm...

Here is an opportunity to discuss about the top 5 features that you would like to see in the next version of SQL Server. It would be nice if you can include a sentence for each feature explaining why it is required. Please use features of SQL Server 2005...

The question about what features are supported by SQL Server 2005 running on Windows Server 2003 comes up quite often. So below are some of the features that are depends on the OS and brief description about them. 1. Password policy/expiration check...

Top N costly query plans...

Please post requests for topics or features that you would like to know about. This can be any of the SQL/TSQL language features or programmability in general. There are so many things to discuss about wrt SQL Server 2005 so it will be good to gauge interest...

Determine primary keys and unique keys for all tables in a database using INFORMATION_SCHEMA views and the new catalog views in SQL Server 2005...

Determing optimal MAXDOP setting value using DMV...

Renaming sa account in SQL Server 2005...

SQLCLR TVF to read registry settings for SQL Server instance...

Database Mirroring configuration using certificate authenticated endpoints....

Ordering guarantees in queries....

Queries to get direct dependencies on the column....

Use of ANSI SQL style DECLARE CURSOR statement in UDF is not supported...

Using OUTPUT clause in INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements...

Testing linked server connection settings....

Performing updates in batches using UPDATE with TOP clause....

Welcome to the SQL Server Engine Tips blog - hosted by the engine program management team. The purpose of the blog is to share guidelines, best practices, tips and answer questions related to implementing and deploying solutions using SQL Server. We will...