This post is triggered by a question I recently saw in the BR Forum asking ideas for merging two XML documents. I thought of adding another installment to the XQuery Labs series to explain how this can be done from TSQL when required. The examples giv...

Forgetting the "sa" login is an issue frequently seen in development & QA environments. Generally the Windows login works, but in some cases the IT team who installed the server may have forgotten to add someone to the sysadmin role. This post provides a proactive recommendation and link to a workaround....

A few days back, while i was working with Alerts for failed scheduled jobs and missing scheduled jobs, i was needed to exclude running jobs. So we can exactly know which jobs are actually failed excluding running jobs and sane case for missing jobs. I a...

Spreadsheets are one of the most popular software for data manipulation. They are widely used and welcomed by business users with their superior advantages. At the same time, the disadvantages of spreadsheets cause business users to be red faced....

Why the spreadsheet is still ruling the BI world? One of the key factors is its low technical requirement. The spreadsheet does not require a complex installation and deployment procedure or the expertise in SQL/MDX/Java script/.Net, let alone a great many of advisory agents and technical experts to give you command....

Microsoft installers have generally been a source of inspiration for all product development teams. Here is one installation check that I believe should be common to all product installers - the long path name check....

As we all know web pages are stateless pages and we need to use session variables in web application to maintain some session over page. Some time we divide our application into multiple layers for example business logic layer,database layer etc. This a...

When viewing the existing table structures, I noticed that one table has a column with datatype defined as VARCHAR(1). I generally do not see this being used. Given that you need to use a character datatype of maximum length of 1, the question is "Is V...

Recently while working with one query to get schedule jobs status, i used xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs object which gives details of state values of all jobs in msdb database and this is undocumented object. But received an error while running following query ...

If you ever need to get a list of installed SQL Server features and their respective patch levels, the Installed SQL Server Feature Discovery Report bundled with the SQL Server installer can be used. This post gives a step-by-step guide about using this handy utility....