I don't know what on Earth AOL developers do in their AIM 6.x setup but they sure manage to mess things up in Vista. Once AIM is installed, my network detection no longer works and it gives an error that reads: "No network - server execution failed." The problem seems to be some kind of COM error and the fix …

I really wish I had more experience with DTS and SSIS (Replication, Clustering, Hardcore HA too), especially since I've been a DBA for 8 years. I bought the Wrox book "Professional SQL Server 2000 DTS" years ago hoping that one day I'd be making 50-step DTS packages but I never had the need. Today, I finished …

This is driving me absolutely crazy. For the 80th time, I'm required to create a user and give it the sysadmin role. I *have* to do this because the software is business critical (Blackberry Enterprise Server, Interwoven DMS) and installs will fail without it. With some software, I can temporarily grant access the take …

While researching for a paper I have to write in class about hierarchical data in relational databases, I was reading Joe Celko's book Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties. In the intro, he mentions a really useful website for validating SQL-92, SQL-99 and SQL-2003. The site is nice enough but could really benefit …

Looking for the T-SQL (somewhat) equivalent to VBScript's FormatDateTime function? I've been too, for years. I finally found it within the CONVERT() function. As stated in SQL Server Books Online: In CONVERT ( data_type [ ( length ) ] , expression [ , style ] ), style is the style of the date format used to convert …

For my final project in my database class at USF, I chose to create a database for a small record label looking to sell albums online as well as provide artist bios, tour information and news. The database, which was scaled down version of a project I worked on in the past, looked something like this: Image not found …

Someone recently asked why I don't use SQL Mail on my SQL Servers (2000 and below). The answer is: I don't want to install Outlook on my SQL Servers. Sure, there are ways around it but I prefer just using "net send" to alert the Operator (moi) then forwarding those messages on to my inbox and phone. Although …

As a compliment to my MaxMind GeoIP Locator scripts and the parse top-level domain from URL function, I've created another function to parse the search term from an URL. I've heard that T-SQL is a bit slow with parsing strings and wanted to test this myself so I created this in both C# and T-SQL. The difference is very …

You can now download SQL Server 2005 SP2 on Microsoft's website. Here's hoping that the install issues in SP1 won't plague SP2 as well!

I found this useful security tip on Microsoft.com. SAFE is the recommended permission setting for assemblies that perform computation and data management tasks without accessing resources outside an instance of SQL Server. We recommend using EXTERNAL_ACCESS for assemblies that access resources outside of an instance of …