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 ...

It used to be that finding and using a sample SQL database was quite simple. In fact, the venerable Pubs database used to be installed as part of the SQL Server installation process. Fast forward to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...