A fundamental skill for DBAs is to have a firm understanding of the SQL Server database engine’s system databases. Tim Chapman discusses these system databases. A fundamental skill for DBAs is to have ...

Knowing what you want from SQL Server is probably the biggest step toward running it successfully in business applications, according to consultant Koen Verbeeck. It's not just about knowing how SQL ...

SQL Server is primarily built around a row-based table structure that connects related data elements in different tables to one another, avoiding the need to redundantly store data in multiple places ...

In SQL Server 2000, we had a nifty little utility called rebuildm.exe which would rebuild the master database in emergency situations. This utility was removed in SQL Server 2005 and has not been seen ...

Relational SQL databases, which have been around since the 1980s, historically ran on mainframes or single servers—that’s all we had. If you wanted the database to handle more data and run faster, you ...

In the beginning, there were files. Later there were navigational databases based on structured files. Then there were IMS and CODASYL, and around 40 years ago we had some of the first relational ...