Consider the following problem, how would you give someone access to parts of a table without giving them permissions on the table directly? Column level permissions or views can be used to project only the required columns; however, when a permission check is done, it is intuitive to check access to the view and the underlying base table.

OWNERSHIP CHAINING

In SQL Server, when an object is accessed through a chain, the owner of the object referenced and the calling object is checked. If both objects have the same owner, permissions on the referenced object is not evaluated. This is called ownership chaining. This idea is extended beyond just database objects to work across databases as well (called Cross-database ownership chaining).

Ever wanted to find out what was happening when SQL Server crashed? Your investigation should also include reviewing the SQL Server activities much like what profiler would do. SQL Server 2008 (Including SQL2K5) out of the box comes with a default trace enabled. This trace keeps track of configuration changes, process level information and other information that can be very helpful for troubleshooting SQL Server related issues.

Post By: Alberto Ortoll Orellana (Bellevue College, WA)

Clustering is an Operating System (OS) Server based technology used to provide failover capabilities, and it is inherently redundant. Microsoft SQL Server is, more specifically, an application server that runs on top of the OS. There are some additional steps involved with setting up SQL Server in a Windows Server configured as a cluster. Server Clusters are composed of 2 or more servers, each server is called a Nodes. On a 2-Node cluster configuration, the first node is active and the second node is passive, it is common to refer to this configuration as a Cluster in Active/Passive mode.

Post by: Adrian Claxton (Bellevue College, WA)

Let’s talk a little bit about migration when it comes to DBMS of the relational model. Migration is a process of moving data and applications from one operating environment to another operating environment. Such environments are relational database management systems for small businesses to enterprise server database management systems for large organizations. Examples of these environments are Oracle, MySQL, SYBASE, Visual FoxPRO, and Microsoft Access. All of these applications can be migrated to Microsoft SQL Server.

What if you have 100's of SQL Server 2005 in your company and you would like to configure all the servers based on some standards (Example: Surface Area Configuration Properties). Take an example you have just installed a SQL Server and also have configured the surface area configuration (SAC) for that SQL Server based on your standards and now you would like to replicate this configuration to 100's and 1000's of other SQL Servers in your company. How would you do that?

Post by: Silin Kuang (Bellevue College, WA)

In nowadays, our lives have heavily relied on information that is available for us.  To make sure database high availability, in another word, to make sure the information is available when you need it, has made a DBA’s role crucial in an organization.  As a consumer, you use the most updated product information available on the website to make a purchase decision.  As a doctor, you use the patient’s information available for you to judge the operation procedures for a surgery.  As a marketing analyst, you use the sales transaction history available to make marketing forecast and financial reports.  With the huge amount of data being added to the database every second, how does DBA’s ensure database high availability?  This article demonstrates the major high availability technologies in Microsoft SQL server 2005 and 2008.

There are times when you may want to create indexes on large tables which may take huge amount of time (sometimes several hours) and yet you want to make the data available during the creation of Index as your database is being used by thousands of users in the production environment.

One of the best features of SQL Server 2005 & 2008 that I like is that it lets you perform restore on portions of the database which is damaged and yet keep the database ONLINE. This was not possible with earlier versions of SQL Server. In SQL Server 2005/2008, you no longer have to take the database offline to perform a restore on a small portion of a database. Once you have identified the pages that need to be restored you have two options:

1) You can perform a PAGE level restore (My recommendation is to do this when you have small number of pages)

2) You can perform a FILE level restore (My recommendation is to do this when you have large number of pages)

Did you know that prior to SQL Server 2005, Microsoft used to ship an executable called "REBUILDM.EXE" that would help you rebuild the Master database? The world has changed and so has SQL Server and REBUILDM.EXE tool.

There are times when you may want to change the date to a specific format at the server level instead of making changes to individual procedures/objects. It would be very tough to perform this change at every object level. However, below commands will help you identify the current date format at the server level and how to change that format.

It becomes very challenging to remember long object names when you are working with linked servers or using a non-standard object naming convention in SQL Server.