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MSDN White Papers a Great Resource
Brian Moran describes several extremely useful white papers that can be found on the MSDN Web site.
Brian Moran
October 26, 2000
2 Min Read
Greetings,
I love working with databases, but I hate the nitty-gritty, detail-oriented aspects of being a DBA. (That's why I'm a consultant instead of a DBA with a real job!) Because of my dislike of the nitty gritty, I like the handy configuration-management stored procedures that Microsoft described and published in an excellent white paper titled "Using Stored Procedures to Identify Common Administrative Issues." The 18-page white paper explains how to use more than a dozen new stored procedures to look for the little things that might go wrong with your SQL Server's configuration. The procedures help you automate dozens of configuration checks, such as
verifying that sp_configure and sp_dboption values are set to reasonable levels
determining whether tempdb is set to a "too small" start-up size
checking for out-of-the-ordinary indexoption or tableoption settings
ensuring that all tables have at least primary key or unique constraint
checking to see whether clustered indexes have exceptionally wide keys that could be degrading non-clustered index performance
looking for stored-procedure tools to investigate blocking problems
You can find this white paper and supporting T-SQL installation scripts on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) SQL Server Developer Center Web site.
While you're there, spend a few minutes looking at the rest of the site's content, such as the following white papers:
a technical discussion of the pros and cons of reimplementing the Duwamish Online sample site using SQL Server 2000's XML capabilities
a review of the new features in SQL Server 2000's version of Data Transformation Services (DTS)
a technical preview that lets you map XML Data Reduced (XDR)-based schemas to SQL Server models for integration with SQL Server's new XML capabilities
a detailed, hands-on review of SQL Server 2000's Indexed View capabilities. (I think that indexed views are one of the most powerful tuning tools in SQL Server 2000's arsenal; you should know when and how to leverage them to your advantage.)
You'll find all of this great content on the MSDN Web site.
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